Customer

Success Stories






















 Ooyala Flex



Ooyala Flex is tailored to your needs so that you can get content to
market faster and more efficiently. It gives you full visibility into your
video supply chain and automates your production and distribution

workflows, saving you both time and money. Here is how some of our Vubiquity Audi
customers are leveraging Ooyala Flex: Large volumes, plus integration with wide portfolio of Demonstrates a brand publishing workflow, players
storage, QC and transcoder. and analytics.

ITV Studios Swiss TV RR Media American Family Insurance
Demonstrates business metadata management, Demonstrates movement of media and metadata Demonstrates workflows to import from Demonstrates workflows and non-video
production workflows with Adobe integration. from production systems to distribution. multiple sources and export to multiple sources. asset management.

ITV CDM TV2 Denmark Financial Times Smoke & Mirrors
Demonstrates workflows for repackaging and Demonstrates orchestrates flow of metadata through Demonstrates video production and collabora- Demonstrates customer scripting, workflows
syndication. different business units. tion in the cloud and Adobe integration. and integration using Ooyala Flex.






CASE STUDY OVERVIEW FULL ARTICLE

ITV Studios: UK’s Biggest ITV Studios:

Production Company Production Modernization
ITV Studios successfully readies their production workflows for the future of TV


THE CHALLENGE IMPACT GOALS Identified as central to this goal was the simplification
of production processes to maximise the benefits of file-
1. To simplify processes as far as possible allowing
♦ Increase efficiency, reduce cost of producing ♦ ITV can manage all of their productions in a single based procedures, to eradicate errors and to hand more
savings of money, time and effort to be invested in the
content via “Production Modernization” project. place, and take the time they save and invest in control to production teams by freeing them from
creative process.
more content. repetitive and mundane tasks.
♦ Migrate ITV Studios’ business processes to a file-
based model, making use of cheaper, more efficient ♦ Workflows are more efficient and faster, leading 2. To capture metadata early on in the production pro-
technology. to significant cost savings and faster production cess and link it with media in a fully end-to-end workflow.
turnaround time.
After careful evaluation of various
♦ Change impacting many groups — non-technical
end users so messaging, training, talent retention ♦ A vital step on ITV Studios technology roadmap
3. To provide the flexibility to apply new techniques and vendor solutions, ITV Studio’s
automated file-based workflows now and in the future.
during this process were all key concerns. was successfully delivered, preparing them for the
Production Innovation team
file-based future.


selected Ooyala Flex as the
♦ Industry prestige — BBC sunk £100M into a similar ITV PRODUCTION TRANSFORMATION

project that failed (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/
ITV Studios is the largest and most successful commer-
basis for a pilot of its production

entertainment-arts-26963723).

cial production company in the UK, creating over 3,500 transformation project.
hours of original programming each year.
SOLUTIONS

Its world class portfolio includes The Chase, Come Dine “We didn’t want to build a bespoke system in house,” ex-
♦ Ooyala partnered with ITV Studios to deliver an Costs reduced by with Me, Dancing on Ice and I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out plains Martyn Suker, Head of Production Innovation, ITV

4%
Ooyala Flex solution to manage production from
of Here! It also produces the world’s longest running dra- Studios. “Instead we wanted a system that would work off-
commissioning to delivery. Phased delivery of
ma serial Coronation Street and hit international drama the-shelf but is also flexible so that we can configure it to
evolving requirements over two years.
franchises including Agatha Christie’s Marple, Poirot and handle our production data and workflows. We were
♦ Ooyala Flex integrates with ITV Studios’ existing Vera. looking for a company open to developing that along-
and new solutions (e.g. storage systems, side us. There was a willingness on the part of Ooyala
transcoding, automated quality control) to manage Like many broadcasters and content producers the to work with us to expand the core functionality of their
workflow orchestration across services. world over, ITV is under pressure to create quality con- product, providing mutual benefit.”
tent, more efficiently than ever. To help deliver on this the
♦ Users across the workflow collaborate in a single
organisation has undertaken a major business transfor- Working alongside ITV’s production teams over a six
system to manage Commissioning, Production, per productions so far, mation project encompassing content modernization, month period beginning Autumn 2013, Ooyala’s product
Post-Production, Legal and Compliance Review,
Auditing and Quality Control.
reinvested in talent to short form creative, and smart production workflows. development team gained a deep understanding of the
increase profit organisation’s existing processes and how Flex could
best be used to improve them.
With production key to ITV’s core business it was only
logical to examine current practices and, where neces-
sary, evolve the workflow and technologies to make the “Only by putting new systems into a real, live environ-
division even more creatively dynamic and responsive to ment can you quickly flush out any issues and learn
market and audience demands. whether your approach is right and what needs chang-
ing,” says Suker.

OOYALA FLEX SUCCESS STORIES







From day one the process embraced everyone involved Like many organisations, ITV’s production information is
from editing and logging staff, to production managers currently spread between disparate systems. This makes
and producers, ensuring that Ooyala understood fully tracking data and video assets very difficult.
how they worked and that the production team under-
stood the benefits of the new technology. The approach Automating essential but mundane routines, such as
was measured and sensitive to managing change re-keying basic information and stripping out the ship-
throughout, including workshops and ample space for ping tapes, hands more control and time to creative
feedback. The focus was on capturing data at its point teams of producers, assistant producers and editors.
Pre- Import Processing Review and Delivery of generation and streamlining labour-intensive tasks
Production Approval
without interfering in the creative process. The promise of file-based workflows is efficiency on
many fronts, yet the transition from tape throws up a
“One of our basic principles was that we needed a number of complexities. One benefit is the ability to
system to be very light touch,” explains Suker. “We didn’t acquire significantly more rushes than before, yet this
want to build a big, centralised Media Asset Manage- also can lead to a loss of control over large amounts of
ment (MAM) system.” media. While it is straightforward to keep an eye on how
much physical tape is being shot, it can be less intuitive
Objects Broadcast
Most of the time ITV productions work independently, in for a producer to understand how many hours a 64GB
the sense that the Come Dine With Me team does not card, for example, represents.
Workflow need to share rushes with, for example, Saturday Night
Take-Away, so there is no need for a conventional enter- As material is input into the production system via Flex,
prise MAM system within a typical production environ- producers are able see at a glance how many hours it
ment. represents. That simple indicator is one practical exam-
ple of how Flex at ITV is giving control back to producers
“What we wanted was a comprehensive approach to so that they can better allocate and budget for storage
Acquired File based QC
Content Transfer tracking data and orchestrating the movement and and plan what to keep and what to delete.
i.e. Baton
tracking of media from one system to another in order to
Reviewer simplify production processes and to cut out time-con- ITV also realised that valuable logging information was

Camera/ Transcoding suming activities,” says Suker. being lost or input erroneously, with expensive and
Workflow wasteful consequences from incomplete data fields and
Cards i.e. Telestream Vantage
time spent trying to reconcile media ion one system with
END TO END DATA MANAGEMENT information in another.

The importance of efficient data management is well
“We need to know where content is, who generated it
understood at ITV.
and when,” Suker continues. “In order to do that we had

to have a technology platform that would not only enable
“An awful lot of metadata throughout the production
us to structure and manage the data properly, consistent-
chain either gets lost or isn’t captured at all,” explains
ly and visibly, but also that allows us to gain value from
Suker. “One of the main criteria we wanted to achieve
that data in other parts of the organisation.”.
was to fill in the missing links in data, truly and for the first

time from end-to-end – from greenlighting of a commis-
If ITV can quality control data at source and establish
sion, right through to delivery and even onto the con-
standardised, transparent and structured metadata from
sumer.”.
the outset, it will save errors which are always likely to
creep in when information is manually rekeyed.

Reconciling media with metadata is core to Flex’s going missing. At the same time user definable flow engine allowed us to automate RESULTS
functionality and begins well before any media has ‘tags’ can be added to individual or multiple shots.
even been created. Within the platform, producers
a lot of things that were laborious 1. Every stage of the pilot programme from commission
to delivery was hooked into Flex’s data management
are able to capture the editorial specification of a new In the craft edit users can open up a similar panel in and time-consuming. Being able to platform.
commission (e.g. production name, channel, number of Premiere Pro, select the exact project according to pro-
episodes, duration etc. which forms part of the standard duction, episode or version, edit the project, and export send out automated notifications
2. All structured metadata is kept in the same place as a
contract between a producer and broadcaster), the completed programme when the session is finished and requests with a link to an on- ‘single source of truth’.
in a process that allows media to be associated with matching it back to the production structure within the
that information as the production progresses. Miio Flex platform in the background. This includes auto- line copy for comment, rather than 3. Data was standardised and consistent, cutting out
understands the hierarchy of a production, series, mated encoding and generation of proxies for review
episode and versions of an episode. and approval — and automatic email notifications and
manually creating a DVD, was a errors.
requests to executive producers and other parties. compelling result for us. That sort 4. Manual tasks were reduced enabling production
The ability to create these placeholders — or Business
Objects — in Flex without having to first attach data to When a version is ready to deliver for transmission, Flex’s of innovation hugely simplifies the teams to do more creative work.

media is central to its operation at ITV. Once a produc- workflow engine handles the Automated Quality Control process and strips out non-value 5. With ITV and Adobe, Ooyala has advanced Flex with
tion template is established, Flex automatically assigns and packaging as a DPP compliant file, before sending
appropriate data to the media. internally to ITV or onto other broadcasters. add tasks.” refined metadata management tools and seamless inte-
gration with Adobe Prelude and Premiere Pro.
Next Steps
With a consistent and unified nomenclature ITV staff With the pilot programme complete ITV is now scaling
are able to search and access just the right version up the platform and rolling it out across ITV Studios
Training on Flex is simple with a
far quicker than previously. Flex is truly multi-tenanted: productions. typical session lasting around one
teammates, production partners and freelancers can be
invited to participate without compromising security or “We’ve seen that our approach is right, that the metadata hour is all that’s required for new
control. framework works in practice and more importantly that users to become familiar with the
production really likes it,” says Suker. “Everybody we’ve
shown it to can see the benefits and how it can make system and get to work with it. Af-
INTEGRATION WITH ADOBE life simpler.
ter evaluating feedback from all
For ITV, Ooyala partnered with Adobe to integrate user
customisable Flex Panels into Adobe Premiere Pro and production staff, the ITV Production
He continues: “In terms of data
Adobe Prelude. Adobe Prelude is a file-based ingest Innovation team intend to begin
application that works in-conjunction with Adobe’s handling, Flex has proven to be
editing application Premiere Pro. The integration allows on-boarding more staff and migrate
flexible and configurable. Its work-
producers and directors to easily add metadata to their
video files directly from within the Adobe product set,
further productions over to Flex in
but controlled by Flex. the coming months as the broad-

As a production’s camera cards are recycled, media caster’s Production Transformation
is ingested and logged into Prelude with all technical begins to yield genuine cost sav-
metadata (bit rate, frame rate, aspect ratio and so on) au-
tomatically extracted, collected and catalogued into Flex ings and creative benefits.
seamlessly and behind the scenes. There is no risk of it

OOYALA FLEX SUCCESS STORIES

 CASE STUDY OVERVIEW

Financial Times:
Multimedia Future of News
Financial Times curates and archives all video ready to integrate with
metadata store.


THE CHALLENGE IMPACT

♦ FT analyzed their income after moving to a ♦ Camera operators in the office and on location can
subscription model on their website. News easily ingest and label new video content. S3
videos were the clearest draw for their
♦ Editors can find clips instantly, and know their (AWS)
subscriber base.
provenance.
♦ FT wanted to generate more video content and
♦ FT can produce more videos, more quickly with
more efficiently repurpose video content they
less wasted time.
already have.
♦ Part of a larger phased programme. FT likely to buy
♦ Ability to easily find video content, and easily
Ooyala Flex MAM, and extend the publishing workflows
curate new videos was key. The end users
this year.
at the FT are video producers and content
operators who don’t want to move outside the Edit Suite Edit Suite Edit Suite
Adobe suite day to day.

LONDON NEW YORK MANILA


WIP Transcoder WIP Transcoder WIP Transcoder
SOLUTIONS

♦ Nativ were recommended by FT’s chosen

Systems Integrator — Support Partners.
SP were responsible for the larger change
programme at FT.
♦ The Ooyala Flex Everywhere solution was
expanded to offer customized panels within the
Adobe suite, to integrate seamlessly with the
workflow engine without direct UI access.
♦ All users across the workflow can collaborate
in a single system to manage Commissioning,
Production, Post-Production, Legal and
Compliance Review, Auditing and Quality
Control.

“… At Audi UK we understand that our visitors love to watch

videos online, especially when it brings to life our incredible
product range. Ooyala Flex has helped us to get more video
content throughout our sites and applications by enabling us
to store, manage and distribute our content to any device…”

HUGH FLETCHER
NATIONAL DIGITAL MANAGER FOR AUDI UK

“… Ooyala Flex provides us with a highly automated tapeless
workflow solution that integrates seamlessly with all our
departments and content providers while maintaining the high
quality of video demanded by viewers today…”

KJELD SKOVLUND
TV2’S HEAD OF DEVELOPMENT

www.ooyala.com [email protected]

Ooyala helps deliver content that connects. A US-based subsidiary of global telecommunications and IT services company Telstra, Ooyala’s comprehensive suite of
offerings includes one of the world’s largest premium video platforms, a leading ad serving and programmatic platform and media logistics solution. Built with superior
analytics capabilities for advanced business intelligence and a strong commitment to customers’ success, Ooyala’s industry-leading end-to-end solutions help large-scale
broadcasters, operators, media companies, enterprises and brands build more engaged and more profitable audiences, and monetize video and TV with personalized,
interactive experiences across any screen. ESPN, Univision, NBC Universal, Star India of 21st Century FOX, Sky Sports (U.K.), ITV Studios (U.K.), RTL Group (Germany), M6
(France), TV4 (Sweden), Mediaset (Spain), America Television (Peru), and Media Prima (Malaysia): these are just a few of the hundreds of broadcasters and media companies
who choose Ooyala. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Ooyala has offices in New York, Dallas, London, Chennai, Stockholm, Sydney, Tokyo, Singapore, Cologne, Madrid, Paris,
Guadalajara, and sales operations in many other countries across the globe. For more information, visit www.ooyala.com.