ITV Uses Telestream Cloud Services to Prepare for BritBox UK on Amazon Prime Channels
Migration to Cloud enables ten-fold increase in media processing capabilities at UK’s premier independent commercial broadcaster
Nevada City, California, April 16th, 2021 – Telestream®, a leading provider of workflow automation, media processing, quality monitoring and test and measurement solutions for the production and distribution of video, has announced a major contract with the UK’s premier independent commercial broadcaster, ITV. The project sees ITV migrating many of its current on-premise media processing operations into the Cloud while establishing new cloud-based media processing operations for preparation of BritBox UK VoD content on Amazon Prime Video Channels.
Commencing pre-pandemic, ITV started bringing in-house a range of content processing operations that had previously been provided by a third-party service. The creative team in ITV’s Leeds facility was expanded to accommodate any craft edits, while the team was faced with the need to rapidly scale up content encoding and packaging workloads. Cloud based services were the only practical solution for ITV, and after evaluation of several alternatives, ITV selected the Telestream Cloud solution and worked with Telestream’s team to onboard a cloud-based workflow for their own content.
The Telestream Cloud team was able to configure the ITV workflows in a very short space of time by porting ITV’s existing Telestream Vantage workflows, resulting in a painless and quick migration to the cloud services. Additional requirements from ITV have been managed in a prompt and efficient way by Telestream.
ITV is expanding its use of Telestream Cloud Services for content processing as their VoD requirements grow in support of the B2C digital strategy. A recent increase in workload included encoding over 7000 hours of content for the launch of BritBox UK on Amazon Prime Video Channels. With a very short time available to process this content, the Telestream Cloud Service’s ability to run massive parallel processing has been invaluable, with up to 300 concurrent sessions being initiated to allow encoding of over 200 long-form media assets per hour.
Selecting Telestream as its technology partner on this project has allowed ITV to deploy its existing pre-approved Vantage workflows for new platform deliveries in remarkably short times and with little or no risk.
During the pandemic, ITV also purchased Telestream’s GLIM remote media player, which allows remote staff to view and validate content directly from AWS S3 storage without the need for downloading proxy versions, which vastly improves their remote working efficiency. GLIM was built to solve well known remote work challenges – to be a superior experience to the ‘remote desktop/virtual desktop’ play back experience, and to prevent remote employees wasting hours every day downloading mezzanine grade media files.
“Telestream’s involvement in assisting ITV to migrate to cloud processing from a large on-prem existing estate shows our intentions to move with our customers’ needs and to continue our joint partnership,” commented Benjamin Desbois, Senior Vice President and Chief Sales Officer at Telestream. “Telestream has always been a key part of ITV’s platform and moving to Telestream Cloud continues that relationship with a long roadmap of new features which will further assist ITV in their vision.”
“Telestream’s broad range of cloud solutions gives us alternative options without having to retrain, re-skill or adapt any of our existing and proved outputs for multiple platform deliveries,” commented James French, Content Processing Team Lead at ITV. “This is a key feature that has saved us time and money from day one. Telestream’s biggest asset is that its tools can be used agnostically across all major public cloud providers.”
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About Telestream
For over 20 years, Telestream® has been at the forefront of innovation in the digital video industry. The company develops products for media processing and workflow orchestration; live capture, streaming, production, video quality assurance, archive and content management; and video and audio test solutions that make it possible to reliably get video content to any audience regardless of how it is created, distributed or viewed. Telestream solutions are available on premises or in the cloud as well as in hybrid combinations. Telestream is privately held with corporate headquarters located in Nevada City, California and Westwood, Massachusetts.
For company and product information, visit www.telestream.net.
About ITV
ITV entertains millions of people and shapes culture. We are a leading media and entertainment company, with the largest commercial television network in the UK and a global production and distribution business, with over 55 labels. Creativity, quality content and engaging audiences in the UK and around the world, is at the core of everything we do.We reach over 40 million viewers every week with our programmes on ITV's family of channels, as well as the ITV Hub, which is available on 28 platforms and on over 90% of connected televisions sold in the UK.
ITV Studios produced 8,400 hours of original programming last. Our global footprint spans 13 countries including the UK, US, Australia, France, Germany, The Nordics, Italy and the Netherlands and our global distribution business sells our catalogue of 45,000+ hours to more than 300 broadcasters and platforms.
ITV as part of its More than TV strategy, has created a scaled Direct to Consumer business in the UK, including recently surpassing 500,000 subscribers to its ad-free catch-up service, Hub+. In November 2019 ITV launched BritBox, a streaming service with the BBC bringing the very best in past, present and future British programming and award-winning content from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 to viewers all in one place.
As the media landscape continues to change rapidly, ITV is focused on building upon its unique combination of creativity and commercial strength, transforming digitally to create a more diversified and structurally sound business.
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