Beyond Distribution

Beyond Distribution has been a leading independent distributor of world-class television content since 1985. Working from their Dublin located office they have established vital sales teams in London and Sydney to capitalise on the wealth of opportunities in these dynamic regions.

Beyond’s name is synonymous with programmes of broad commercial appeal to television audiences worldwide and host a content catalogue comprising over 4,000 hours of top quality and multi-award winning programming.

Challenge

Early in their evolution Beyond Distribution recognised that they needed a robust, but simple solution to receive, store, search and share content across their various markets and territories. While evaluating both in-house and external asset management systems they considered both the upfront investment and the on-going technology development and maintenance as a big commitment outside of their core services. Their base requirements were not unique to the industry and mirrored what a number of broadcasters and distributors face in being able to:

• collect files electronically from local and overseas content owners
• store files in a secure environment
• add searchable metadata to collected content
• distribute content in a secure environment
• share content across territories and time zones.

SIlver Trak Digital approached Beyond with the custom built Media Room platform as the potential solution.

Solution

Media Room was demonstrated as an easy to use and inexpensive solution for Beyond Distribution.

The platform allowed Beyond Distribution to collect media from any of its content owners through Media Room’s intuitive Upload function. Files would be directly uploaded to the platform using Media Room’s Aspera protocol at no cost to Beyond Distribution or the content owner. When files had been processed in Media Room, Beyond Distribution’s sales and distributions teams would receive a notification that a new file is ready to view.

The inbuilt features of Media Room would then provide Beyond Distribution to quickly review and add additional, unique, searchable metadata. Files in either Native form or transcoded to any format/resolution would be stored in secure private cloud or in AWS according to Beyond’s preference. With file readiness created, Beyond Distribution can deliver files and screeners to any audience across the world using Media Room’s Aspera; via download link, Aspera to Aspera or AWS S3 push.

Outcome

The Media Room solution met Beyond Distributions key criteria and gave them a viable Asset Management option that they would have otherwise invested considerable amount of time and money creating.

Beyond Distribution has been a Media Room client for more than 2 years. They now hold more than 5,000 programs in Media Room and collect/distribute more than 10TB of content data monthly.