Foxtel

Foxtel is one of Australia’s most progressive and dynamic media companies providing the best in live sport, new and classic movies, shows and complete seasons, hosting both live and on-demand viewing anywhere, anytime. Content is offered across cable, satellite and broadband distribution to 2.8 million subscribing homes across the Australian expanse.

As a constant champion of innovation Foxtel has not only invested in ever expanding and developing technology such as iQ3 video recorder, HD distribution, broadband and home phone bundles, but has committed to close to A$1 billion investment in new and original Australian content.

Foxtel’s commitment to quality content, quality distribution and quality service has kept it at the front edge of subscriber viewed content.

Challenge

The on-going commitment and investment in Australian screen and television content means that Foxtel have large footprint with several domestic production companies and look to nurturing their on-going capability to produce and deliver content seamlessly to the Foxtel platform.

An immediate need identified by the Foxtel production/programming team overseeing and approving content was to find an easy to use technical solution for independent producers or companies that would allow rushes and finalised broadcast content to upload and seamlessly transcode to the Foxtel distribution platform in a secure and easy to use manner

Solution

Media Room was researched, trialed and feature tested as a technology and content management platform for this purpose. Media Room provides a no cost upload facility for all media content engaging an automatic Aspera file acceleration protocol facilitating production companies from across Australia to rapidly upload content in raw format.

Powerful transcoding engines integrated within Media Room then operate through basic workflows to transcode the content creating high quality streaming proxy and downloadable proxy with automated alerts going to the Foxtel team of file readiness. Foxtel internal processes can then apply their own internal processes for content approvals and vetting with content and applied specification returned to Silver Trak Digital for final processing for delivery straight through to the Foxtel Media Asset Management system.

Outcome

The whole process has been streamlined and operates with a rapid workflow protocol with vastly reduced human intervention allowing production to be received processed and made ready for final distribution in a matter hours rather than days as was the case previously.

The adopting of Media Room by Foxtel has now run over 250 feature or series productions through the workflows and has provided Foxtel with a secured and instantly accessible library of masters. The benefits have been the ease of content upload and processing together with the financial capability for the Foxtel Content Sales team to on-sell programming directly through Media Room. The unlimited scalability of the storage platform has removed the ever expanding technology and maintenance costs and provided Foxtel with the peace of mind over back-up and redundancy.