Case studies that speak volumes
Supporting Discovery Sports to prepare its technical infrastructure for the Olympic Games
Client's
challenge
Discovery Sports’ activity revolves around its live and on-demand coverage of major international sports events, including Eurosport’s multi-platform coverage of the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020. In order to best deliver this highly qualitative content to its viewers and subscribers, Discovery wanted to build greater usability and flexibility through a significant upgrade and centralization of their technical infrastructure.
Along with Grass Valley, Woody partnered with Discovery Sports to support the transformation of its scaled and complex production and broadcast infrastructure across Europe. A major tech transition for Discovery’s sports programming and content, including streaming and Eurosport channels.
Vendor’s assignment was to provide all systems required for production – including media management, post-production and playout – and to make cloud deployment a priority.
- Every Discovery and Eurosport journalist had to be given access from anywhere in the world using Single Sign-On (SSO).
- Specific cloud safety norms had to be applied.
- The infrastructure had to be fully compatible with PC, Mac, Android and iOS clients.
- The Signiant solution had to be the File Transfer Acceleration technology.
- Hard deadlines had to be fully prepared ahead of the Olympic Games
In order to meet Discovery’s unique requirements, we set up one 4-node IN2IT exchange farm in London and a similar one in Amsterdam to transcode files ingested from any location: media are redundantly ingested to both platforms and accessible via the new Grass Valley AMPP Asset Management (AMPP AM) deployed in AWS.
Another IN2IT exchange cluster allows access to all IN2IT ingest profiles from every client station, regardless of their operating system, and from everywhere in the world. Profiles are filtered for each user according to the rights granted by Discovery and Eurosport administrators. Discovery hosted the server with its partner AWS.
Every time Discovery sets up a new profile, IN2IT access clients are automatically updated.
The platform includes Single Sign-On: user authentication works via Okta integration, a provider that enables users to utilize their corporate credentials in Woody applications.
Regarding IN2IT access, Discovery opted for floating licenses.
More than 100 Discovery and Eurosport production staff and journalists across the world used the internet and local networks to connect during the Olympic Games. The solution demonstrated strength and reliability. Thanks to this success, Woody system has been fully used for a second Olympic Games, during the Beijing 2022.
Woody also developed a light IN2IT exchange interface designed to enable fast and easy upload via a web browser.
This cloud-based UI makes it possible to browse files locally, and to then upload and send them according to IN2IT profile workflow rules.
System administrators can deploy this agent on journalists’ computers, in a single click and in compliance with Discovery workflows. Users can additionally benefit from a dynamic integration with AMPP to populate metadata fields.
The UI gives journalists great flexibility and responsiveness to meet tight deadlines, especially when covering major sports events such as the Olympic Games.
And in order to make IN2IT exchange fully compatible with all operating systems, we made a macOS version of the new upload agent.
Ahead of schedule, and to prepare Woody’s intervention, Discovery acquired a staging platform and tested it at Tour de France and Wimbledon events.
To meet Discovery’s needs, we integrated the Signiant solution and developed a load balancing system on Signiant, so Discovery could easily scale up the number of Signiant agents. AWS S3 integration in IN2IT exchange was also widely used in Discovery workflows.
Close collaboration with Discovery’s project team in Paris allowed for seamless and timely adaptation to project changes.
A delivered project that catered to the unique and complex requirements of the Discovery team. Emmanuel Jacky, Engineering Director MAM, PostProduction and Playout at Discovery said “Thanks to Woody’s partnership we have the perfect tool to import content. In a cloud environment this is the gateway to our MAM with the security level expected. It provides enough flexibility to answer the daily requests from operational teams in a sport environment with efficient metadata management.” Successfully managed cloud deployment : the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 provided an excellent and successful real-life performance proof of the upgraded infrastructure. Approximately 120 Discovery team members around the world used Woody solutions to upload an estimated 5,000 files on the new production system during the 3-week Olympic Games. From our perspective, and in addition to the rewarding feeling of a satisfied client, the collaboration was a means to improve our product performance for the benefit of future clients. A Mac and PC compatible upload agent is one example. Aurélien Brelle, Managing Director at Woody Technologies said “The collaboration meant support for the transformation of one of our long-time clients. It also fast-tracked our product evolution towards cloud deployment and remote workflow ingest, and added a new MAM among supported third parties in the IN2IT environment.” Grass Valley and AMPP are trademarks or registered trademarks of Grass Valley LLC or its affiliated companies in the United States and other jurisdictions.
Speed up and facilitate remote ingest and outgest from all locations
Belgian network DPG Media chooses IN2IT access and IN2IT exchange to support its news environment overhaulClient's
challenge
DPG Media Belgium is a leading media group in Flanders, and is part of a larger Media group, which is also active in the Netherlands and Denmark. The group is active in commercial TV, radio, magazines and online services.
The network needed an upgrade for its current news production environment, focused on improving broadcast and online publishing.
The main goal was to make all media available for editing and swift publishing across different locations. After a broad request for proposals, our partner Diginet was retained to deploy a new infrastructure based on Avid and Woody solutions.
DGP Media wanted a modern NLE agnostic production system with a central repository and focus on location-independent working for web and news production. Woody’s key role was to provide the main file ingest and outgest solution.
Time was of the essence, as the vendor selection had occurred in October 2020, the project kick-off in November, and the new platform had to go live on June 15, 2021
The main expectation of IN2IT exchange was to allow fast publishing to a wide range of online platforms. As for many broadcast companies, production is shifting more and more to online publishing.
Exporting assets from Avid MediaCentral | Production Management to Google Drive is another major workflow handled with IN2IT exchange, allowing local and remote users to deliver content to colleagues and partners.
IN2IT exchange is directly accessible to DPG users inside Avid MediaCentral | Cloud UX environment, through a dedicated app.
To date, the system is not yet at full scale. In the near future, DPG Media intends to connect a second Avid PM system to Woody ingest and outgest backend and add an extra dedicated ingest client for post-production flows, which will greatly free up a few edit booths from ingesting to sequences for vision and precut.
The main expectation regarding IN2IT access was to “bring ingest to the field” both from computers and a mobile app that journalists could download on their smartphone.
And, as access of host buildings is more and more a traffic problem, DPG Media also wanted its teams to benefit from IN2IT access easy remote and field ingest capabilities.
DPG Media already had a good experience with IN2IT Social, especially the easy way to configure workflows, the system’s flexibility and the benefit of doing ingest from anywhere. The company expected to find similar qualities in the new solutions to be implemented.
Their trust in Woody’s flexible system and setup, agile product development and fast implications of extras and fixes was key.
According to Mick Moyson, Senior Media Support, compared to the previous workflow, “the biggest benefit is the outgest part that gives us export workflows directly from Avid production management through the Cloud UX app”. He praises the “possibility to create similar workflows for the users from the ingest desk and from the IN2IT access interface”. He puts it simply: “Although it is something entirely different in the back, it looks the same for the users. Ingest from anywhere with an intuitive UI”. He also mentions “the possibility to use Google Drive for vision files and easy file share to external partners” through a simple download link. Last but not least, end users are pleased with the outgest capabilities from the UX interface with a multitude of destinations and delivery formats. Following the news overhaul, DGP media is now deploying its post system, which will also benefit from the Woody backend and ingest capacities.
Ensure a smooth transition of users to new technology stacks, tools and workflows within a very short timeframe
Our partner Qvest Media selects our solutions for the top media company in AustraliaClient's
challenge
Nine Network is the biggest media company in Australia, covering all type of media outlets from TV and radio, to online and print. Having outgrown their headquarters capacity, they relocated in a brand-new building in North Sydney and took this opportunity to overall the technology stack and embrace new technologies.
We were brought in by our partner Qvest Media, who was acting as a system integrator and helping Nine with change management, transformation, budgeting, sourcing and so on.
Part of their task was to design, deliver and integrate the news and postproduction systems at Nine. To meet Nine’s needs in the matter, Qvest Media selected Avid, EVS and Woody as key vendors.
The challenge was also for Qvest to complete the whole project, from initial contact at NAB in 2019 to initial implementation around February 2020, under a tight 15-month deadline, regardless of the COVID pandemic.
Nine Network decided to use Woody solutions to ingest into the Avid MAM and PAM as well as to outgest to Nine’s remote offices.
The MAM and PAM system was based on Avid MediaCentral | Cloud UX including Nexis shared storage, MediaComposer, Pro Tools, and EVS for the baseband ingest and playout.
Qvest Media deployed IN2IT access for the ingest of camera cards, as well as the cloud-based ingest of incoming assets. In both cases, IN2IT access processes both media and metadata and makes them available into the Avid databases. Both operators and journalists proceed in full autonomy and, to prevent any mistakes, ingest profiles have been pre-configured by administrators.
Woody set up 15 ingest stations at the newsroom. To ensure safety, redundancy and scalability of infrastructure, several IN2IT server farms have been deployed.
IN2IT exchange servers manage all manual and automatic ingests as well as outgests from the PAM. Content is automatically transcoded to Mezzanine format.
One IN2IT exchange cluster is dedicated to the export to social media outlets.
Journalists use IN2IT social for the search and ingest of social media content, and are able to work easily and directly from their web browser thanks to our Chrome plugin. As the result of Cloud deployment, working away from the office is now just as quick and easy.
One IN2IT exchange server is dedicated to the ingest of social media content as well as remote IN2IT access for affiliate station reporters in the field.
We also deployed IN2IT live for the ingest of NDI feeds and web streams. This solution gives video editors real-time access to workflows in their Avid MediaCentral environment.
Furthermore, during the project, Nine Networks decided to move its provider authentication and security from Active Directory to OKTA (Cloud authentication provider).
We were able to effectively manage the change and integrate into the directory services to provide flexibility for the management of user rights and configurations.
The main reason to select Woody was the need for user-friendly solutions and easy integration to Avid environment. The ability to change profiles or adapt workflows without the need of an expert was key. For instance, Qvest configured 50 profiles for IN2IT access at Nine and the directory service integration makes it still very easy to manage and dislodge configurations. Users at Nine Network adapted quickly to Woody’s solutions and are very happy. They mentioned that the most significant improvement that products brought to their workflows concerned file ingest from all kinds of sources. Woody solutions solve a lot of pain points Nine Networks had with their previous product. Clients are especially happy with the fact that many of the feature requests they have asked for during the project have been achieved or developed by Woody within the project’s time frame. As Rob Filby, Nine Network’ News Media Operations Manager shared with us: “IN2IT access, social and live have all enabled us to substantially increase the productivity and efficiency of our Nine News operation.”
Help journalists in the field or at home to better work remotely
Regional broadcaster in Switzerland chooses IN2IT access and IN2IT socialClient's
challenge
Canal 9 is a Swiss local TV station that broadcasts programs in French and German.
Prior to the pandemic, intending to facilitate their journalists’ remote work, they launched an important transformation project.
Canal 9 initiated the migration of its workflows to the cloud during the summer of 2020. The change was the most impressive in the newsroom, where DINA from 7Mountains and the MAM from Stratus | Grass Valley had to migrate to the cloud. The second step was to offer their teams new tools to make work consistently easier: they selected our IN2IT access and IN2IT social solutions.
As Canal 9 CTO told us, “people don’t care about which codec they use or which file name to add. People care about watch folders that works”.
They picked IN2IT access to make sure their journalists would not lose time and energy on technical matters.
We deployed IN2IT to simplify their camera and file based ingest locally, but even more importantly, remotely, from home or the field, thanks to the IN2IT access app that they were able to download on their smartphone.
Regarding IN2IT social, Canal 9’ s main objective was to enable journalists to search for and download social media content from the web, without assistance from the technical team.
The back end of IN2IT access and social was partially deployed in the cloud to allow easier administration and maintenance, but also to simplify access to users who were not connected to the company’s network.
Canal 9 was particularly impressed by the search portal, and the daily usefulness of the Google Chrome plugin.
Since Canal 9 teams have adopted the new solutions, every media has been automatically transcoded and sent seamlessly to the cloud. As Canal 9 CTO told us: “At the end of the day, everything is available in the system and it is a big change for us”. However, Canal 9’s big show about regional elections in October was what really put Woody solutions to the test! The goal was to collect a large panel of reactions about every candidate. Each Canal 9 journalist was given a phone equipped with an IN2IT access mobile app. That enabled them to send 45 stories from the field directly to the studio. In the meantime, IN2IT social allowed them to get real-time content about the event from social networks and the web. The challenge was met to everybody’s satisfaction!
Help journalists streamline their booming search and ingest of social media content during the pandemic.
A major U.S. network chooses IN2IT socialClient's
challenge
The recent times have been very challenging for all of us in the Media & Entertainment industry. Worldwide, all broadcasters have been forced to adapt their production methods to the unprecedented measures of quarantine, with a significant impact on news coverage workflows. We have seen Social networks play a major role in this situation, with a significant increase in social media generated content used by news broadcasters.
In this context, in April this year Woody Technologies was asked by a major US based broadcast network, to provide a fully operational solution in order to streamline the search and ingest of web and social media content for their editorial teams across 7 locations in North America and the UK.
IN2IT social has been deployed in Microsoft Azure enabling access by all journalists wherever they are, at home or remote field reporting during the quarantine period.
Using IN2IT social, they can easily and quickly search for the latest content posted on social networks such as Twitter, Youtube, Vimeo, Facebook, Instagram and more, then select the relevant posts for their news stories and deliver this media with the highest resolution available to any or all of their global news locations.
The fast search and ingest of media across multiple social media sites ensures producers and legal teams can approve content well in advance of the news broadcast. Furthermore, the new IN2IT social plugin for Google Chrome allows them to ingest photos and videos from multiple websites and social networks, straight to the appropriate production site. Thanks to the central user management and monitoring, administrators get a real time overview of the content being ingested across the 7 locations. IN2IT social ingest profiles have been configured to ensure that every user provides details about the related story when ingesting content, in order to track content to the PAM.
In each of the 7 locations, IN2IT exchange has been deployed in order to retrieve the selected content from the cloud, transcode videos and photos to the mezzanine format and publish media and metadata to the Avid® MediaCentral|Production Management systems used on each site. No metadata is lost on the way, as IN2IT social and IN2IT exchange preserve all relevant information (source URL, description and author) and transfer them to the PAM.
Fast deployment was a key major factor for this project.
Only a few days were needed between the customer decision and the first use of IN2IT social by end users, including the setup of the cloud platform, the deployment of IN2IT exchange on site and the configuration of the end to end workflow. After 2 weeks, 5 installations were fully deployed and operational in New York, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Charlotte and London with more than 250 registered IN2IT social users. Deployment at the other sites Chicago, Miami is continuing. Woody Technologies offers various solutions to enable remote production workflows, covering file-based ingest and publishing, live ingest and social content ingest needs. Subscription models and cloud hosting is available for most of Woody solutions.
Remote archive from Bogota to Paris with IN2IT exchange
France Médias Monde for France 24 spanish-language news channelClient's
challenge
Produce content in Bogota, Colombia and archive it in Paris, France. This is the daily workflow of France 24 for its spanish-language news channel. Thomas Wiard, TV technical manager at France Médias Monde testified for us on the use of IN2IT exchange in this workflow.
« IN2IT exchange has been deployed at France 24 to manage the transfer and archiving of content from our Spanish branch in Bogota, Colombia to our main facility located in Paris, France. Thanks to its deep integration with Avid® solutions IN2IT exchange can automatically transfer all Avid assets while preserving all of the technical and editorial metadata. The integration of IN2IT exchange with FileCatalyst® enables transfer acceleration for a fast and efficient workflow. » Thomas Wiard, TV technical manager at France Médias Monde
IN2IT exchange is designed to automate and centralize transfers from an Avid environment to external storage, playout server, cloud infrastructure, or archive system…, handling simultaneously media, technical metadata and editorial content.
The editorial team of the France 24 Spanish TV channel, based in Bogota, produces daily stories for live broadcast and digital environments. The content is produced in the Avid MediaCentral environment. These locally produced stories must be archived in Paris, in the global archive system of France 24.
IN2IT exchange automates the extraction of media from Avid storage along with the technical and editorial metadata from the PAM and NRCS, and transfers this package automatically to the Parisian site of France 24 in Issy Les Moulineaux. In order to accelerate the transfer, Woody Outgest relies on its integration with the FileCatalyst solution, which makes it possible to overcome the latency constraints related to the distance between the two sites. The entire workflow is highly automated, and can be supervised from Paris.
Organize and simplify ingest of web content for a news editorial team
TelemadridClient's
challenge
IN2IT social was integrated into the contracting project of a service to provide a platform for the production of audiovisual content automatically in the RTVM facilities.
This project was executed by a system integrator Aicox Soluciones (Spain) with a support of x-dream-distribution GmbH (Germany), Woody Technologies’ EMEA representative.
Telemadrid has decided to implement the IN2IT social solution that Aicox Soluciones currently distributes in its facilities.
IN2IT social was designed to allow journalists and technical operators to easily and quickly search and retrieve content published on social networks and websites, in order to use them for editing in a broadcast environment.
The growing importance of the use of social media content for editorial production, makes it necessary to provide intuitive and simple tools to users, allowing engineers and directors to keep the workflow under control.
IN2IT social is Woody Technologies’ answer to this need, thanks to a simple interface accessible from anywhere in the newsroom or ingest department. The media processing engine integrated into the IN2IT social server, handles the downloading, transcoding and publishing of media and metadata directly into the production environment (shared storage and media asset management).
In addition, the web browser plug-in for IN2IT social allows users to activate ingest tasks from any supported web page in 2 clicks.
The implementation by Telefónica Servicios Audiovisuales of its Sony Hive news production system, together with a video server for the live content, the corresponding user terminals and the automation elements, allows the elaboration and broadcast of audiovisual contents efficiently and reliably.
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