JOHANNESBURG, South Africa —Building audience loyalty is the ultimate goal for storytellers around the world. In an age with never-ending content, how can you guarantee audiences will consistently turn to you?
As Africa’s leading entertainment platform, we understand that challenge well. It’s beyond owning the rights to the right content; it’s also about knowing how to distribute, archive and leverage it well.
MultiChoice South Africa offers entertainment in all its forms: from SuperSport, Africa’s premier sports broadcaster, to DStv, a video entertainment company, and GOtv, a digital terrestrial television platform known for its affordability.
Delivering engaging stories across all platforms is no small feat. Knowing our content is enjoyed by over 23.5 million households in 50 markets across sub-Saharan Africa, we understand our duty to our audience.
Managing 24/7 Media
For our extensive media portfolio, receiving live and file-delivered content requires a system capable of prioritizing and distributing that content, at scale, in a 24/7 operation. This is why we count on Viz One, Vizrt’s enterprise media asset management (MAM) system, to strengthen both the live content distribution and storage management.
MultiChoice uses Viz One to produce, acquire and package media for sports and entertainment for over 200 channels broadcast across the African continent. In essence, Viz One catalogs MultiChoice’s vast media portfolio and makes it available to our users. They can search across asset and timeline level metadata captured from every item in the system to preview material and create shot selections, quickly finding the right piece of media in the expansive archive in a matter of minutes.
The MAM system makes content available for editing and dubbing workflows, regardless of whether it is currently importing or sits within our ever-growing archive, which currently stands at over 1.5 million hours of HD content.
This means that the assets captured for top-tier sports—including football, cricket, rugby, motor racing— as well as any other program and commercial material, are properly stored and readily available. Then, our MAM team creates the highlights, program versions and stage media for playout every day of the week.
In 2010, the Media Asset Management Engineering and Support team was created at MultiChoice, and by 2015, we had more than doubled in personnel. I’m responsible for managing the full MAM system and engineering support team, which means coordinating between multiple teams, including the MultiChoice Operations and other engineering teams, for road mapping the workflows and any process enhancements required.
For the last 14 years, we have grown the MAM System from a small IBM Tivoli Storage Management digital tape storage with 800 terabytes of data—managing and transferring commercial content only and the Ardome MAM System—to an IBM Tivoli Storage Management digital tape storage with more than 72 petabytes of data. This was replicated at our DR site, managing all content processing of the entire content broadcast on MultiChoice and SuperSport linear and digital channels.
It’s paramount for the efficiency of all MultiChoice platforms and programs that we use our digital tape storage as efficiently as possible.
Supporting Creatives
It’s undeniable the potential the creative industry has across Africa. Being responsible for researching and helping implement new technologies that streamline our platforms and processes, I know well how technology can help ease the creative process.
Because we have the trust of millions of households across the continent, we have taken this rich revenue of the attention economy to amplify African stories, investing back in the talent of our audiences. From supporting M-Net’s channels, which create original productions of authentic stories, to enterprise development such as MultiChoice’s Innovation Fund and Africa Accelerator, we’re committed to elevating African talent.
By leveraging our unique platform, we enrich a broad ecosystem of consumer services for creatives across Africa—all underpinned by scalable technology. As we grow, so do the stories we share and keep.
More information is available at vizrt.com.
