Nevada City, California, October 25th, 2018 – Telestream, a leading a leading provider of digital media orchestration and delivery solutions, today announced that Los-Angeles-based Adstream, a global digital asset management and advertising delivery technology company, with headquarters in London, has chosen both cloud and on-premises deployments of the Vantage media processing platform to automate its high-volume media transcoding and quality analytics needs. Through its global ad services network, Adstream enables 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, Adstream gives users 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.
Vantage automates many of the most demanding, time-sensitive creative, production, and distribution tasks that involve media processing. “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,” commented Steven W. Brown, Chief Operating Officer/North America, for Adstream.
With a customer base of over 27,000 businesses and over 2 million media assets in its cloud storage environment, Adstream has now converted its Telestream Vantage media processing platform to a fully virtualized configuration that seamlessly dovetails with its AWS-based infrastructure.
“By adopting this Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud model, which enables automatic dynamic 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,” said Brown.
Adstream’s virtualized Vantage is now cost-effectively leveraging AWS dynamic scaling to swiftly handle transcoding demands, seamlessly accommodating workload fluctuations. To date, Adstream has 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 now 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, Adstream ensures a high degree of security by maintaining control over the media assets that customers entrust to their platform.
While Adstream is now fully deployed in the cloud, the company still operates a back-end infrastructure, including a large production services department that uses Avid editing and Adobe graphics systems. This facility also uses Telestream Switch Pro for quality control file inspection and correction, as well as Telestream CaptionMaker and MacCaption closed captioning software.
As their labor-intensive closed captioning workflow becomes increasingly automated, Brown estimates that they’ve been able to reduce the manhours they must devote to closed captioning services by 40%.
“This operational efficiency reduces overhead costs and helps increase profit margins, while freeing up our core staff to manage other pressing tasks at our growing company,” Brown said. “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,” Brown added. “And ultimately, we’re helping our customers manage their own operating costs, media assets, and global ad management and distribution objectives.”
