Objectives & summary

BBC Worldwide is the commercial arm of BBC Production. It creates and delivers video content across its different business areas for the commercial exploitation of the BBC’s most popular brands and archives, such as Top Gear and Planet Earth.

Delivering a high volume of content to a number of platforms, including broadcast and the web, different departments were working independently using a variety of workflows and without a technology infrastructure that allowed the sharing of media. This meant time consuming manual processes, duplication and bottlenecks in the delivery of content because different people needed to access the same media simultaneously.

Support Partners...

• provided workflow consultancy,
• designed the digital production solution, and
• implemented a shared media environment for 20 editing systems.

The implementation included a powerful transcoding solution and an asset management system to manage the high volume of shared media content.

Support Partners are now providing ongoing support and consultancy to help BBC Worldwide evolve its workflows and bring further efficiencies to its business.

Phil Checkland, Head of Business (UK), at Support Partners, says:

"The project has resulted in much more cohesive production workflows across BBC Worldwide departments. It has delivered workflow efficiencies and time savings, speeding up, simplifying and integrating the production process and making it possible to do more production in-house."

Solution

Support Partners’ role was as follows:

• Created the technical design for the edit village; designed the infrastructure with a standardised software and operating environment across all edit systems.
• Provided a specialist server integration solution based on combining Final Cut Server, Apple’s XSAN and Telestream’s Episode Engine.
• On-site, an ‘embedded’ Support Partners consultant coached individual users on the workflows and use of the systems, as part of the knowledge transfer programme and introduction of best practices.
• Integrated the workflow between the Editing Village and its off-site digital media archive, the ‘Digital Hub’.
  • Users can now request online digital content, which is then transcoded into an editable format and delivered tapelessly to the work-in-progress storage, available for editing.
  • Digital access to meta-tagged clips and archived footage means that it’s quick and easy for editors to find, share and use this media whenever they need to.
  • Content and media assets can be accessed and shared by different departments across BBC Worldwide.
• The central Support Partners team provides a layer of additional support and consultancy, with access to all their knowledge and skills.

Business benefits

• Media is transcoded or ingested centrally into a shared environment, so that all departments have access to media for collaborative use or re-use.
• Users can access material from the digital archive more quickly for use in their edits.
• The Global Channels team, who previously ingested media onto hard drives that were passed to producers and editors, can now ingest media centrally. This media is available for sharing across the whole team.
• Has the capability to create and deliver standard and high definition content to multi-platforms, such as the web and mobile applications.
• Production media assets are digitally available for use and exploitation upstream in the production cycle.
• A centralised environment supports more efficient end-to-end workflows; it also provides ongoing opportunities for adapting workflows to capitalise on the technology investment. Being able to transfer media tapelessly between the archive and the edit village makes the workflow more streamlined.
• By bringing creativity into the heart of the business, it will help transform the culture and encourage greater collaboration and innovation.
• Editors can get more out of their production tools as they have them available at their finger tips.

Phil Checkland from Support Partners adds:

"The integrated server solution is a leading edge approach, only possible because of our close relationships with the manufacturers, Apple and Telestream. The infrastructure ensures the system works very fast and is ideal  for a combination of edit suites in rooms and an  open plan, desk top editing environment."

Client website

BBC Worldwide