Production & Media Supply Chain Management

BBC Studios

BBC Studios is home to the very best of British creativity. Combining the strengths of the UK’s most-commissioned production company and a world-class distributor, BBC Studios are an unrivalled creator of – and investor in – UK programmes reaching audiences around the world.

Project Scope

BBC Studios utilise BLAM as a general purpose “fits-all” tool for orchestrating file movements, manual-processing and automated-processing across a wide range of source and destinations. The initial focus is the aggregation of media from all corners of the BBC Studios business the operating model is driven by flexibility and horizontal scalability. The platform supports diverse business functions: as the production asset management system supporting the Adobe Premiere Pro equipped Edit Village and as the content supply chain management platform for international media distribution. The platform supports multiple operational workflows in the UK and US for content fulfilment to platforms such as Rakuten, ITV Britbox, SES with further global expansion planned for 2022.

BLAM Deployment

• Cloud (AWS) hosted BLAM with multiple distributed Workflow Runners (WFRs) managing eleven storage pools between the UK and US.
• BLAM Finance module for cloud services cost monitoring and reporting.
• Google Sheets data reader for external configuration of delivery workorders.
• 40 Adobe Premiere Pro plug-in ‘seats’ provide direct access to media within the Premiere application environment for the TVC Edit Village capability and interacts seamlessly with automated workflows.
• Telestream QC connector BLidget provides automated QC in a management by exception workflow.
• Telestream Vantage connector BLidget provides access to Telestream’s cloud transcode capabilities.
• AWS MediaConvert connector BLidget for cloud-based media transcode.
• Aspera connector BLidget enables accelerated file deliveries.
• AWS MediaConvert connector BLidget for cloud-based media transcode.
• AWS storage management connector BLidgets Set AWS Tags, Set S3 Storage Class and AWS S3 XRegion Transfer.
• SAML connector for SSO via the BBC Identity service.

Business Outcomes

• A unified ingest process which simplifies receipt of content from AWS S3, Aspera, NAS and HTTP transfers using multiple sets of data schemas, IDs and file matching rules ensures data consistency.
• A fully modular delivery systems sending content via S3, Aspera P2P, Aspera Shares and NAS drives across the world. An integration with Google Sheets allows new endpoints to be added by operational users outside of the Workflow buider.
• WorkOrder based content fulfilment is highly automated process reducing operational costs.
• The WorkOrder model is highly configurable, via Google Sheets, enabling operational flexibility without complexity.
• Real time reporting of content delivery progress provides rapid access to management information to keep clients informed.
• Rules based storage management ensure disk utilisation is optimised and costs tightly managed.
• Bucket-to-Bucket delivery model significantly reduce transfer costs and time.
• Efficient content delivery operations using AWS S3 bucket-to-bucket.
• Centralised metadata management has enabled a single ‘go to’ repository across the operation.
• Automated content assembly workflows create VT clocks, freeze frames and stitch to programme content saving significant effort in edit.
• Task driven workflows ensure that operators have a prioritised ‘to-do’ list with BLAM automatically loading the required resources.
• The built in BLAM video player which allows ancillary media – audio stems and subtitle files to be selected and monitored – greatly accelerates verification of associated media.
• Integration with the Yella Umbrella Stellar task management system delivers rapid and accurate ancillary material management.

The built in BLAM media player is frame renders video with frame accuracy and allows ancillary media (subtitles and audio stems) to be played along with the video for rapid validation of timing and track arrangement.