The group was comprised of seven different stations situated across the US. Their content archives were stored on old tapes which Tape Ark processed and migrated to AWS.
Customer Challenge
The customer was a US-based television broadcasting group with seven local television stations primarily airing local news for cities such as Houston and Detroit. Their mission is to passionately inform and celebrate the local communities where they are stationed, but at the time they felt that there was not enough unity between each of their bases. Each local newsroom had its own production studio with different staff and its own equipment.
From an operations point of view, this was a major inefficiency. The company wanted a new group-wide framework to consolidate their personnel and unify their existing structures, helping them to put out better news and at the same time strengthen their group as a brand. This would involve moving all of their historical content from their different tape archives to a new platform. Tape Ark was called in to take care of this process.
Our Solution
Tape Ark are global experts in tape to cloud migration with extensive experience and demonstrated capability working in the Media & Entertainment industry. Tape Ark’s scalable technology stack and highly experienced team rapidly position data in the cloud, regardless of the tape type or format. Our unique cataloguing process contextualizes library metadata for enhanced searchability and greater discoverability, and efficient auditing processes offer an accurate indication of the expected cloud footprint for precise budgeting.
This job was completed using our standard restore procedure, or our Tape Ark Mass Ingest Workflow. The outcome for the customer was a digital library where they could access their content at the click of a button, and utilize production features to get their programs ready to air.
Results and Benefits
This tape-to-cloud migration was a round success. By liberating their data from their old tapes, Tape Ark facilitated this customer’s move from a total of seven different studios to a central production studio in the cloud. Merging the seven studios into one allowed them to economize on equipment, removing the infrastructure that was no longer necessary. Having all of their material on a collaborative database that all the stations were able to access meant that they could prepare their programs in concert, knowing the stories that the other stations were covering. It meant that their content was rapidly searchable, immediately accessible, and insured against loss. The time it now takes the company to broadcast is as a result considerably shortened.
The substantial cost savings unlocked for the customer were mainly to do with their centralization. Instead of managing seven different studios and maintaining them with all the equipment they needed, moving their operations to just one in the cloud suddenly freed up a lot of their budget.
This project demonstrated the applicability of Tape Ark and AWS’s solution to a new type of customer, the television broadcast group. It reinforced our belief that Media and Entertainment and Broadcast companies, perhaps more than companies from any other industry, have so much to gain when they switch to the cloud. The collaboration between our two parties was once again key to the project’s success.
