NEW YORK—At A+E Networks, our mission has always been to push the boundaries of what’s possible in media and entertainment. As we’ve grown, so has the complexity of managing our vast content library, which spans iconic brands such as A&E, The History Channel, Lifetime, FYI and Vice TV, as well as content production ranging from scripted series and documentaries to reality TV and digital content. With this growth, the challenge was clear: We needed to evolve our media supply chain to meet the demands of a rapidly changing industry.
Our journey began back in 2016, and by 2017 we were well into our multiyear cloud initiative, migrating our enterprise systems to AWS. However, it wasn’t until 2018, when new library deals for many different streaming platforms started coming through and our on-premises infrastructure became oversubscribed, that the justification for a cloud-based media supply chain became undeniable. This was the turning point that led us to take our supply chain into SDVI and its Rally platform.
Rethinking the Supply Chain
Leveraging manufacturing principles that tend to break operations down into inputs, processing, and outputs, we started thinking about our supply chain in three high-level phases. First, “In” was where we received new content in and qualified it as ready to use. Next, “During” was where we created all the different versions needed to make a piece of content viable on all platforms everywhere. Finally, “Out” was where we made all our various distribution formats and registered them with each partner and streaming service.
With a high-level outline in place, we began moving media processing into the cloud and digitizing our library. The SDVI Rally platform became the backbone of this initiative, and quickly began to support operations across all phases of the supply chain. We relied on Rally to be our central orchestration platform where we could create automated workflows and tie them together with massively scalable, cloud-based media processing services. This meant that when our library digitization project took off, we were able to scale up our operations seamlessly, handling about 400% more work than we planned for.
The “out” side of our supply chain began to ramp up equally fast and at a similar scale. In one example, A&E was working on a large content deal with a major streaming service—one of our biggest competitors—around the launch of their streaming service. At first, we estimated it would have taken a team of five people 30 to 60 days to manually get all the content uploaded to them and registered in their systems one at a time; we had about 10 days. By spending most of that time building automated workflows in Rally (and working with their engineering team, another Rally user, who was able to support a new way of doing mass content transfers), we were able to send all our content in about 16 hours (and make the deadline with a few hours to spare).
Streamlining the Process
With our catalog in the cloud and the “in” and “out” transfer phases of our media supply chain well underway, we turned our focus to the “during” phase: media transformation. In this phase, we combined the Rally platform with Arch Platform Technologies and Polaris from TMT Insights to introduce operational management and work order-based editing in the supply chain, streamlining the process of adapting content to address our multiplatform distribution needs. This new platform allows us to automate getting content ready for editors to get engaged, maximize their time making changes to shows, and then automate as much as possible after their work is complete.
Editors log into Polaris, navigate to the Tasks queue and assign an edit job that’s ready for work. This triggers Rally to drop the source file into their personal user queue within the Rally Access Premiere Pro Panel. They launch an Arch cloud workstation with an editing instance set up with Adobe Premiere, and all the right settings and presets to enable this type of transformation work. A Rally Access panel talks back and forth to the supply chain, which allows us to take data that was entered upstream, put it right on the timeline as markers, let the editors do their work at those moments in time, add some more markers and then render the finished product in the cloud.
Leveraging manufacturing principles, we found that optimizing the handoffs across the supply chain—how content and metadata move from one step to the next—was as important (if not more important) than optimizing each step individually. With our new platform supporting cloud-enabled editing and seamlessly passing media and metadata through all three phases of our supply chain, we’ve made massive efficiency gains in delivering high-quality content to platforms and audiences around the world.
More information is available at https://sdvi.com.
