CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES – London-based media technology business, Blue Lucy, has set up a US division of the company and appointed Dina Behar Hevert as VP Americas. The company’s entry into the US market follows significant growth in the UK and the launch of new solutions targeting the broader media market.
Blue Lucy creates products that close the expensive technology gaps in media operating models across the world. Global media companies including BBC Studios, Banijay Rights and Blue Ant Media rely on Blue Lucy’s flagship product, BLAM, for integration, workflow orchestration and media management at scale. The company launched their new product, BOLT, at the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC Show) in September this year. BOLT is an asset portal that provides effortless access to content, allowing executives to receive, review and share content without needing any technical expertise – making it faster and easier to monetize media.
Dina Behar Hevert has worked in media and entertainment for almost twenty years and brings extensive industry knowledge and a vast contact base to Blue Lucy’s newly-created position of VP Americas. Her career started in broadcast transmission roles at Globecast, FOX Sports and The Switch before she moved into business development for localization companies including SDI Media, SPG Studios and Deluxe. Most recently she’s worked as VP of business development for Emmy-winning language customization company, The Kitchen.
“What attracted me to Blue Lucy is that their products answer a very real need in both the traditional media and entertainment world and in the broader media market,” said Behar Hevert. “In particular, the flexibility they provide for integrating multiple tools into existing technology stacks is really impressive and I am genuinely excited to introduce Blue Lucy’s solutions to the US market.”
As Blue Lucy’s VP Americas, Behar Hevert is responsible for growing the company’s US customer base and recruiting local staff. She reports to CEO Julian Wright and joins Blue Lucy’s senior management team which has already seen significant growth this year with the addition of Alison Pavitt as chief marketing officer, Joshua Martin as head of product and Joe Hegarty as director of IT.
Julian Wright, CEO of Blue Lucy said, “Expanding our team into the US is a natural next step for Blue Lucy and part of our strategic plan for growth. It was critical that we find the right person to help establish our first international division – someone who is enthusiastic about the value our products and who has a deep understanding of the local market. We’ve found that in Dina and we’re thrilled to have her on board.”
Since its launch in 2020, Blue Lucy’s flagship product, BLAM, has also been the company’s only product. BLAM is a sophisticated workflow orchestration, system integration and media management platform, and both its core capability and the microservices which comprise its orchestration functionality have constantly evolved in that time. It has, however, remained Blue Lucy’s sole solution. Until now. At IBC 2024, Blue Lucy launched BOLT, a new product that’s described as a global gateway to content libraries for non-technical users. We asked Blue Lucy founder, Julian Wright, what prompted the decision to develop a new product and what distinguishes BOLT from BLAM.
Q: Can you give us an elevator pitch overview of Blue Lucy, BLAM and BOLT?
A : Blue Lucy’s ethos is to take an orthodoxy-challenging approach to solving media business problems. Our core product, BLAM, is a sophisticated integration and orchestration platform designed to meet the complex and evolving business needs in production, localisation, and distribution. BLAM is an “enterprise” platform that serves the operational needs of multiple aspects of a media business. Our new product, BOLT, is an operationally-simple offering designed to meet a fundamental, but most important, business need for any operation handling media assets – accessibility.
Q: What was the initial motivation for developing BOLT?
A : In BLAM deployments our implementation engineers and analysts tend to work with the media operations team within the ‘engine room’ of the operation. In conversation with senior management teams, we were often surprised by statements along the lines of “your platform is great, the automation is really driving time to market and cost efficiency but at the executive level we would just like a really simple way to view our current inventory.”
Q : So, is BOLT simply a media portal for viewing content?
That’s how it started, but it’s developed into more than that. On further examination, we uncovered a number of apparently simple requirements within the commercial business (i.e., outside of the technical content supply operation) that could be addressed by a toolset similar to BLAM. Alongside the basic requirement to search and discover content is the ability to create showcases and viewing rooms and distribute these to sales prospects or internal marketing teams via secure links. Some customers want to create one or more branded ‘storefront’ portals to directly support sales or similar customer self-service functions. On the subject of “portals” we saw a clear a common requirement within distributors to provide easy-to-use media upload portals to their production partners to allow them to push finished content and production metadata to the central content management and processing function. This is particularly important to the aggregator distributors or production companies that hold a number of separate brands or labels under a broader umbrella. BOLT satisfies all of these needs – it gives you effortless access to your content, provides an intuitive upload function and allows content owners to showcase and monetise content catalogues.
Q: Many of these capabilities are available in BLAM – what makes BOLT different?
A : All of these functions can be supported by BLAM as standard but as a collection of capabilities there was clearly a need for a commercially-focused product in its own right. This is particularly the case in the overarching requirement that the tools needed to be easy to use – we took this one step further and defined the vision for the new product that it should have a zero-training requirement and be as intuitive to use as an on-line banking app – well the good ones at least.
Q: Are BLAM and BOLT totally independent products?
BOLT is built on the BLAM core technology and existing BLAM users may add the BOLT capabilities to extend the operational reach of their BLAM platform to support commercial and external business activities. In this context, if BLAM is the engine room, BOLT is the viewing platform. But BOLT is of course also available stand alone as a separate product.
Your content inventory represents the most significant proportion of the value of your media business. To maximise that value, make it accessible with BOLT from Blue Lucy.
Find out more about BOLT here or get in touch with the team to arrange a demo.
Everything you need to know about Lucia, BLAM’s new AI assistant.
The Blue Lucy team introduced BLAM’s new AI assistant, Lucia to the media and entertainment industry at IBC Show 2024 in Amsterdam. And, while the application is still in development, the industry response to Lucia has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic, even earning the Blue Lucy team a TVBEurope Best of Show IBC 2024 Award. But, in a market flooded with AI messaging, what makes Lucia special and what difference will she make to BLAM users? We asked Blue Lucy’s head of product, Joshua Martin and Lucia’s primary developer, Aaron Leanage, to answer some frequently asked questions about Blue Lucy’s newest addition.
Why did you create Lucia?
At Blue Lucy we believe that technology needs to constantly evolve to keep up with the needs of the media and entertainment industry. This ethos is a big part of the reason why we built our BLAM platform on a microservice architecture, as it allows our team to develop and deliver new integrations and capabilities really quickly. But we wanted to explore how the latest AI developments could make it even easier for our customers to get value from the platform.
Our goal was to lower the entry point to automation – so that customers don’t always need an engineer to create or manage processes or get answers to complex questions about workflows. Most operators can describe what they’d like the system to do, but not everyone has the time or capacity to learn how to access BLAM’s full functionality – Lucia was created to remove this barrier for our less technical users. Even typing is optional because Lucia responds to both text and voice prompts in conversational language, making BLAM accessible to almost anyone.
What can BLAM users expect from Lucia?
Lucia works alongside organisations’ predefined workflows to help with anything from simple searches to bulk actions and complex chained commands. Where workflows in BLAM are hard-coded to do things in a pre-defined way, Lucia provides flexibility for use cases that change from day-to-day.
For example: if you’ve got a big batch of new content coming in and you need to generate placeholders, remove the bars and line-up and then save the media in a new storage folder, Lucia’s got it covered. And she remembers what you’ve asked her to do before, so it’s really easy to repeat processes or revise them without having to start from scratch.
Some of the actions Lucia can take (which can be combined to create complex chained commands) include: asset searches, folder searches, creating placeholder assets, creating folders, attaching and detaching assets from workspaces or folders and getting metadata, workflow or user data.
Besides automation, what other capabilities will Lucia provide?
Because Lucia is based on a large language model (LLM) she can be used to perform tasks like summarising information, doing mathematical calculations, translating text and answering general questions that users may have about content formats, metadata and almost anything else – and you don’t have to leave the platform to find the information you’re looking for. Lucia can also be used as a business intelligence and support tool. You can ask her questions about your content and workflows, like how many assets are in a certain folder or whether any episode numbers are missing from a series of programmes, or get Lucia to perform calculations on data retrieved such as “get me all complete workflow runs completed in the last 24 hours and calculate the average runtime.” This kind of information would previously only be available if the workflow had included a report generation process.
As Lucia is still in development, we’re still in the exploratory phase, establishing what the potential capabilities are and what would offer the most value to our customers. For example, if the AI assistant is integrated with BLAM’s data processing service, Lucia can use historic data to predict asset-based costs and identify workflow bottlenecks. Similarly, Lucia could rewrite BLAM user documentation in everyday language tailored to your operational context and answer users’ technical queries, cutting down on customers’ first-line support costs.
Have there been any unexpected benefits?
It quickly became apparent at IBC Show that different BLAM users would find value in Lucia for different tasks. So, while a user may be interested in asking her how to do something or creating bulk or chained operations, managers may find Lucia’s ability to summarise large amounts of data more useful and use her to find out how long it takes for workflows to be completed or how long it may take for a user to pick up a task. One of the unexpected benefits we’ve discovered is how Lucia could be used to optimise BLAM’s implementation, for example an administrator can use Lucia to identify which microservices need to be updated or to interrogate workflows to identify bottlenecks.
Is Lucia safe?
Lucia can only add value to content or processes in BLAM. She can’t modify workflows or change the original assets, and she isn’t able to do anything that results in a loss of data. What this means is that, while Lucia can be used to create new versions of content, the original asset will remain intact and unchanged and, although the application can be used to build complex chained commands, she can’t interrupt or edit existing workflows. Lucia is also bound by the same user-permissions as the operator working in BLAM, so she can’t take any actions or access any information that the user isn’t already cleared for.
When it come to keeping your data and content secure, Lucia uses your organisation’s AI provider, credentials and authentication so there can be no cross-contamination of data between BLAM customers, and Lucia will comply with any security agreements you have in place with your provider. The application currently runs in OpenAI’s ChatGPT and can be set up in Microsoft Azure’s Open Ai, but we plan to integrate Lucia with our customers’ choice of any large language model (LLM.)
When will Lucia be available in BLAM?
Lucia is scheduled for general release to BLAM customers by the end of 2024. Get in touch now to chat with the team about how Lucia might benefit your organisation or to arrange a demo.
Join us at MIPCOM CANNES this October to discover how Blue Lucy can give you effortless access to your content. We’ll be showcasing BOLT, the new super simple media portal which gives media executives a simple way to showcase content, putting the entire library at your fingertips. With BOLT you can secure, curate and share content without needing any technical expertise. Make your appointment today!
Blue Lucy is bringing its new media portal, BOLT to MIPCOM 2024, Cannes, October 21-24th. On stand P-1.C50A at the MIPCOM Innovation Lab 2024, the team will demonstrate how BOLT provides effortless access to content, allowing media executives to receive, review and share content without navigating complex UIs or waiting for technical teams to deliver files. Blue Lucy will also host a discussion at the Global FAST and AVOD Roundtable Event on October 22nd during the show.
Blue Lucy is exhibiting at MIPCOM for the first time this year, but the company and its products are well-known by many of the attendees and other exhibitors. The business was founded by technology consultants who have worked with broadcasters and content creators for over two decades, and global media companies rely on Blue Lucy’s flagship product, BLAM, for integration, workflow orchestration and media management at scale. Launched at the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC Show) in September this year, BOLT is designed to address the fundamental issue of content accessibility for non-technical team members.
BOLT reconnects commercial media teams with their content through three core functions:
Receive: BOLT provides a simple-to-use, intelligent upload function that ensures content is received with the metadata your business needs. Rather than waiting for content to arrive and then adding metadata to it, with BOLT the content request is delivered along with set parameters and metadata requirements so it’s immediately searchable and can be set to trigger specific processing workflows on arrival. So, your media hits the ground running.
Review: BOLT puts your entire content library at your team’s fingertips – regardless of their technical capabilities. The portal’s stunningly straightforward operation and user-focussed functionality means sales teams can search and view content from any web browser without having to request access or learn how to use advanced toolsets.
Share: BOLT provides a simple platform for content owners to showcase [and monetise] their content catalogue. Now, sharing content with potential customers is as easy as adding items to a shopping cart, while secure links to viewing copies are automatically created and delivered to your prospects.
Julian Wright, CEO of Blue Lucy said, “BOLT not only provides commercial teams with easy access to content, but it also provides analytical data about how customers’ interact with the media. It’s all about showcasing content and sharing data to support commercial success. What better place to demonstrate BOLT’s capabilities in this area than MIPCOM, an event dedicated to showcasing the best content in our industry!”
On October 22nd Blue Lucy CEO, Julian Wright, will lead a discussion at the Global FAST and AVOD Roundtable Event. The session will draw on the company’s experience supporting FAST channel delivery for clients like BBC Studios to explore how automation and AI processes can remove obstacles and reduce labour-intensive tasks that make FAST delivery difficult. Participants will also discuss what data sets and metrics content owners need to make informed decisions about future content offerings.
Blue Lucy has announced plans today to launch BOLT on stand 6.C29 at IBC 2024, Amsterdam, September 13-16th. Described as an asset portal, BOLT provides effortless access to content, allowing media executives to receive, review and share content without navigating complex UIs or waiting for technical teams to deliver files. The Blue Lucy team will also demonstrate extensive integrations and a powerful AI assistant in BLAM, Blue Lucy’s proven tool for asset management, workflow orchestration and integration, at the show.
BOLT is designed to reconnect commercial media teams with their content through three core functions:
Receive:
BOLT provides an intelligent upload function that ensures content is received with the metadata your business needs. Rather than waiting for content to arrive and then adding metadata to it, with BOLT the content request is delivered along with set parameters and metadata requirements so it’s immediately searchable and can be set to trigger workflows in BLAM on arrival. So, your media hits the ground running.
Review:
BOLT puts your entire content library at your team’s fingertips – regardless of their technical capabilities. The portal’s stunningly simple operation and focussed functionality means sales teams can search and view content from any web browser without having to request access or learn how to use advanced toolsets.
Share:
BOLT provides a simple system for content owners to showcase and monetise their content catalogue. Now sharing content with potential customers is as easy as adding items to a shopping cart and secure links to viewing copies are automatically created and delivered to your prospects.
BOLT will be shown working as both a standalone product and in conjunction with BLAM on the Blue Lucy stand at IBC 2024.
The Blue Lucy team will also demonstrate the power of BLAM’s extensive integration capabilities at the show and introduce visitors to its new AI assistant “Lucia.”
BLAM’s unique approach to integrations:
With nearly 500 existing connectors and an almost limitless ability to quickly add new integrations due to the platform’s microservice architecture, BLAM allows media teams to connect disparate systems in their media supply chain. IBC 2024 attendees can expect to see demonstrations of BLAM’s integration with products including Adobe Premiere Pro, Amazon S3, Monday.com and Rascular on stand 6.C29a. The team will also highlight the company’s open-access approach to integration that sees their customers maintain control of the commercial relationship with each vendor to maximise business value.
Meet BLAM’s multitasking AI assistant:
Visitors to Blue Lucy’s stand will be the first to meet Lucia, BLAM’s new AI assistant. Lucia takes the grunt work out of media management and workflow orchestration in BLAM and is especially useful when multi-step, bulk actions need to be performed. For example: users can type instructions in plain English to set up complex workflows like automatically generating placeholders, removing bars and tone and creating a folder for a batch of incoming content.
Julian Wright, CEO of Blue Lucy said, “Blue Lucy is known for helping media companies manage their media, orchestrate workflows and integrate technologies. At IBC 2024 we’re expanding the reach of these benefits by putting content in the hands of commercial teams and leveraging integrations and AI to make media supply chains even more efficient. We’re looking forward to showing IBC visitors what our products can do!”
Join us at IBC this September and discover what’s new at Blue Lucy
We’ll be showcasing BOLT, our new super simple media portal which gives media executives an effortless way to showcase content, putting the entire library at your fingertips. With BOLT you can secure, curate and share content without needing any technical expertise. And that’s not all…
Visitors to our stand will be the first to meet Lucia, BLAM’s new multitasking AI assistant. Lucia takes the grunt work out of media management and workflow orchestration in BLAM, and she really comes into her own when multi-step, bulk actions need to be performed.
For content orchestration at scale, book your BLAM demo. With over 500 existing connectors and an almost limitless ability to quickly add new integrations, BLAM allows you to connect disparate systems in your media supply chain. Explore how quickly BLAM can deliver value when your project kicks off and get you straight to the functionality you need. Make your appointment today!
In the early 2020’s the BBC Studios team recognised that the cloud provided a golden opportunity to share and monetise their extensive archive of original content. But before they could provide their team with access to sales masters, audio stems and subtitles and start repurposing their content in the cloud, they faced a few challenges.
While the media company has a vast array of assets to support international content delivery, the material is from disparate sources, stored in various locations, and needed to be brought under management in an organised manner. In addition, their processes were people-intensive and didn’t provide the agility required for content distribution directly to clients, FAST platforms and regional operational offices.
BBC Studios’ content was not only stored across various locations and platforms, but the material also featured different naming conventions and data structures, making it difficult for the team to find the assets and the information they needed. For this reason, BLAM was initially implemented to bring BBC Studio’s disparate media under management. Because the BBC Studios team also needs to ensure that historic content meets modern standards, BLAM orchestrates an intelligent quality control process during ingest that combines automated and manual tasks to maximise efficiency. The process starts with an automated QC using Telestream’s Cloud Qualify and Yella Umbrella’s Nebula then, if the content fails the custom analysis rules and tests, BLAM automatically triggers a manual QC task using GrayMeta’s Iris Anywhere or Yella Umbrella’s Stellar. Because these tools are integrated into BLAM as part of a closed loop, the tasks can be completed without leaving the platform and results are tracked in a single user interface.
Ingest with intelligent quality-control
BLAM was originally deployed to bring BBC Studio’s content under management for UK teams, to implement a uniform data structure, and support distribution with basic content repurposing functions. However, over the course of the initial three-year contract, this has expanded and international BBC Studios teams now use BLAM to orchestrate numerous fulfilment workflows.
Supporting content fulfilment from anywhere
BBC Studios also needed a solution for finding and preparing content for delivery as manually searching for programme IDs in spreadsheets containing thousands of assets, and clicking each item to trigger delivery was time-consuming and inefficient.
To that end, the Blue Lucy team worked with BBC Studios to develop an accessible content fulfilment system that allows the content operations teams to trigger BLAM WorkOrders from outside of the platform.
The original intention was that orders for content would originate from an upstream system (such as a rights management or a work order management tool) which would then push a request to BLAM to fulfil them. As an interim solution, Blue Lucy’s team implemented the same process using Google Sheets, allowing BBC Studio’s team to prompt automated content searches, ancillary asset collection and media preparation by simply selecting their requirements from a series of dropdown menus in a spreadsheet. As the content searches run, BLAM also writes data back into BBC Studio’s Google Sheets to update the team on progress and alert them to any missing material.
Automated content repurposing
In addition to supporting remote editing for content preparation, compliance and shortform promo creation in the cloud, BLAM provides the ability to automate processes involved in repurposing traditional broadcast content for BBC Studio’s FAST channels – tasks that previously would have required a team of people and dedicated facilities to complete. What started as simply automating bucket transfers from Aspera and transcoding in Vantage has progressed to a sophisticated workflow where content can be automatically repurposed to remove bars and tone, create slates and add transitions with minimal user intervention. In fact deliveries are often fulfilled by BLAM as packages which, alongside the transcoded video for playout include promotional material, various language subtitles, audio files, and a metadata sidecar.
The BLAM factor for FAST channels
The success of BLAM’s implementation at BBC Studios is not only due to the platform’s ability to solve their workflow requirements. It can also be attributed to Blue Lucy’s unique approach to working with media customers – an approach that is particularly attractive for FAST channel media supply pipelines where the need for rapid implementation is paramount.
A pricing model built for volume
While other companies base their pricing on per-episode and per-platform delivery fees, with BLAM your bill doesn’t increase just because you’re putting more content through the platform. BLAM’s pricing is based around functions or tools rather than throughput – so you’ll only pay one license fee for transcoding regardless of how many assets you reversion or endpoints you deliver to.
No code/ low code for rapid workflow configurations
Blue Lucy’s engineers work directly with the customer, developing a deep understanding of your needs so they’re able to create rapid integrations and quickly deliver value. And because BLAM’s architecture is based on microservices, bespoke sets of code can be developed and added to the system without disrupting the core functionality – so you don’t have to wait for next month’s release to start using a new application.
A combination of manual and automated processes
BLAM is designed to provide automation with human control – so team members are inserted into workflows when necessary, rather than spending their valuable time driving and managing tedious processes. This makes implementation of new projects much simpler because you can automate the parts of your workflow that take the most time, leaving manual steps in between, and BLAM will orchestrate both processes. And all the information you need to track your project’s progress – across both internal and external systems – is available in one place in BLAM.
“Our use of BLAM has grown over the last three years as we discovered the platform’s capabilities and worked with Blue Lucy’s engineers to create bespoke workflow configurations,” said Adam Jakubowski , VP technical operations at BBC Studios. “BLAM supports our teams’ agility and the demands of the business to manage, transform and monetise our content, assisting global teams and clients. New workflows have been rapidly iterated and integrated to meet our evolving needs by the Blue Lucy team.”
BLAM currently manages over 20,000 titles and 100,000 assets through ingest, QC and normalisation workflows for BBC Studios. Over 230,000 files have been delivered, equating to more than one and a half petabytes of data. A new, multi-year agreement was signed in early 2024.
Blue Lucy has signed a multi-year contract with BBC Studios, who will continue using its BLAM media management platform. The new contract is an extension of a previous agreement and sees the content provider using BLAM to automate the collection, repurposing, and delivery of content to internal and external partners, including servicing BBC Studios FAST channels.
BLAM was originally deployed on BBC Studios’ AWS instance to bring disparate content under management, implement a uniform data structure, and support distribution with basic content repurposing functions. However, over the course of the initial contract, BLAM use has expanded and the international BBC Studios team now uses the platform to orchestrate both automated and manual tasks. The ingest workflow has been enhanced with closed-loop integrations with Telestream’s Cloud Qualify, GrayMeta’s Iris Anywhere and Yella Umbrella’s Nebula and Stellar tools to provide an automated quality-control process that triggers a manual QC when necessary. Content is repurposed to remove bars and tone, create slates and add transitions with minimal user intervention. The Blue Lucy team has also worked with BBC Studios to develop an accessible content fulfilment system that allows the technology operations teams to trigger BLAM Work Orders from outside of the platform to orchestrate content searches, transcode media and gather supporting assets for delivery. To date, BLAM has supported BBC Studios’ processing of over 20,000 titles / 100,000 assets under management, which equates to more than one and a half petabytes of data.
“Our use of BLAM has grown over the last three years as we discovered the platform’s capabilities and worked with Blue Lucy’s engineers to create bespoke workflow configurations,” said Adam Jakubowski, VP technical operations at BBC Studios. “BLAM supports our teams’ agility and the demands of the business to manage, transform and monetise our content, assisting our global teams. New workflows have been rapidly iterated and integrated to meet our evolving needs by the Blue Lucy team.”
Julian Wright, CEO of Blue Lucy added, “BLAM’s low-code / no-code workflow configuration model makes it a particularly attractive solution for businesses with rapidly changing objectives to support new revenue lines such as FAST channels We’re really pleased that BBC Studios has seen such a rapid return on their investment in BLAM in recent years and we’re looking forward to continuing our work with their team.”
International production studio, rights business and channel operator, Blue Ant Media, has chosen Blue Lucy’s BLAM platform for media supply chain automation.
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