LOS ANGELES—Adstream is a global digital asset management and advertising delivery company based in Los Angeles with headquarters in London. Through our global ad services network, we enable the world’s major brands, advertising agencies, and media and entertainment companies to better manage the speed, quality, and costs of their ad campaigns.
Instead of engaging in the laborious, time-consuming process of contacting and managing siloed suppliers, such as production companies, post houses, and broadcast networks, we give our users access to a single portal where they can quickly assess the status of their ad campaigns, make decisions and changes, manage media assets, and control costs at every stage of the process.
VIRTUALIZED CONFIGURATION
Since many of these demanding, time-sensitive creative, production, and distribution tasks involve media processing—to convert or repurpose ingested media files into whatever formats and standards are needed—our cloud-based service relies heavily on Telestream’s Vantage media processing platform to automate our high-volume media transcoding and quality analytics needs.
We chose to build on Vantage because it’s a proven, full-featured automation platform, and we trust Telestream to further expand its capabilities to address changing market needs.
With a customer base of more than 27,000 businesses and over two million media assets in our cloud storage environment, we have now converted our Telestream Vantage media processing platform to a fully virtualized configuration that seamlessly dovetails with our AWS-based infrastructure.
By adopting this Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud model, which provides automatic scaling up or down, we now have greater operational flexibility to handle the peaks and lulls of our workload. We can instantly provision whatever level of compute power we need to satisfy customer demand, and cloud-based pay-as-you-go pricing enables us to better control costs.
To date, we have integrated Vantage and other technologies to create end-to-end workflows and services for many cloud-based processes such as:
● Closed captioning using .SCC and other closed captioning files
● Watermarking, including Nielsen and Kantar schemes
● Media quality analytics, including LKFS loudness compliance
● High-quality Vantage transcoding
● NTSC/PAL conversion with Tachyon from Telestream partner Cinnafilm
The Adstream platform is robust enough that top brands, advertising agencies, and media and entertainment companies can collaborate with their creatives and suppliers, manage media assets, and execute global ad campaigns—complete with timely approvals, job tracking and reporting—even when the key participants are located in different places and time zones.
The platform itself is very broad, interfacing with a wide range of cloud services, including AWS S3 storage, AWS RDS regional database service, and distribution portals for over 75,000 connected media networks worldwide. More importantly, we can ensure a high degree of security by maintaining control over the media assets that customers entrust to their platform.
While we are now fully deployed in the cloud, we still operate a back-end infrastructure, including a large production services department that uses Avid editing and Adobe graphics systems. This facility uses Telestream Switch Pro for QC file inspection and correction, as well as Telestream CaptionMaker and MacCaption closed captioning software.
As our labor-intensive closed captioning workflow becomes increasingly automated, we are estimating that we’ve been able to reduce the manhours we devote to closed captioning services by 40 percent.
This operational efficiency reduces overhead costs and helps increase profit margins, while freeing up our core staff to manage other pressing tasks. We’re also able to invest more time and money in improving front-ends and feature sets that our customers want.
By building all of these Vantage-automated workflows into a single, unified AWS ecosystem, we’re able to deliver an on-demand service model that inherently controls costs. Ultimately, we’re helping our customers manage their own operating costs, media assets, and global ad management and distribution objectives.
As the Chief Operating Officer at Adstream North America, Steve Brown oversees the technical and daily operations of a staff of 50 that includes, client service, human resource, technical development, and operations professionals. He can be reached atsteve.brown@adstream.com.
For more information, please visitwww.telestream.comor call 877-681-2088.
