Blue Lucy

This year’s NAB Show in Las Vegas marked a noticeable shift in the priorities of media and broadcast organisations. Gone are the days of chasing flashy, or “cool”, innovation for innovation’s sake. Instead, the conversations we had—and the interest in our solutions—made one thing clear: the industry is doubling down on practicality, efficiency, flexibility and value. As a technology partner, that message resonated with us. It validated our ongoing focus on delivering tools that don’t just push boundaries, but solve real-world challenges—scalably, securely, and cost-effectively. Here are the key themes that shaped our NAB 2025 experience:

Cost Control is Now a Strategic Priority

Across the board, operational cost reduction has become the top agenda item. Many vendors push a “transformation” agenda but from users we heard most “measurable RoI,” “efficiency,” and “time to value.”

Instead of massive technology overhauls, customers are prioritising targeted improvements with measurable outcomes. Our BLAM integration and orchestration platform is designed to support such an approach, streamlining operations without requiring wholesale change – BLAM stood out as a natural fit.

Hybrid Cloud/Ground Is the New Norm

The industry’s cloud conversation has matured. It’s no longer about choosing between on-prem or cloud—it’s about finding the right balance based on operational business need and cost. Organisations are increasingly adopting hybrid architectures that maintain critical workflows on-premises while using the cloud to when its more efficient or cost effective.

Our platform was designed to support hybrid deployment from the outset and enables seamless integration across systems, services, and territories. 80% of our deployments are cloud-ground hybrid and deliver cost effective control, flexibility and scale.

Integration Is Essential, Not Optional

With consumer platforms seeming to grow exponentially across OTT, FAST, and social manual workflows simply can’t keep up.

The benefit of automation is a given, but integration delivers more value through reduced friction, removing manual process, and providing end-to-end visibility. At scale operational efficiency is no longer a business benefit —it’s a survival requirement.

Unlocking the Value of Content Archives

Companies are looking to mine their legacy libraries for untapped value, especially in digital and on-demand markets.

Our tools that support fast discovery, repackaging, and delivery—through automation and easy to access tools.  Blue Lucy is helping customers monetise what they already have, without heavy lifting.

Fast Value, Real Accountability

Today’s buyers are sceptical of long, drawn-out transformation programs with vague promises and PowerPoint workflows. They want to see real value—fast.

At NAB, we heard over and over how important rapid deployment, measurable results, and continuous improvement have become. Our approach is that we are a long-term partner in outcomes and continuous service, not just a provider of products.

Empowering the Creator Economy Securely

With content creation becoming more decentralised—and the creator economy exploding—organisations need to give teams secure, flexible access to content.

Whether it’s internal creatives, freelancers, or partners, our platform ensures content is available wherever it’s needed, without compromising security or governance. That balance of ease of access and control is more critical than ever.

Looking Ahead…

NAB 2025 confirmed what we’ve been hearing in conversations all year: innovation still matters, but it must be grounded in usability, agility, and value.  Blue Lucy is continuously building technology that meets those demands—today and into the future.

6 RULES TO LIVE BY

Arguably the top priority for media businesses in 2025 is to reduce operational costs. But that’s easier said than done when you’re faced with increasing content delivery demands for an ever-evolving consumer landscape. Based on our real-world experience working with international media organisations, we’ve put together six principles to help you save money across the content supply chain.

1. You can’t monetise what you can’t see.

There are vast libraries of unmanaged content running into the 10s of petabytes at a number of the big production labels – much of which isn’t even available as a browsable version. This media may as well not exist as you can’t monetise what you can’t see.  This is a common situation that’s increasing due to the significant M&A activity in the industry where multiple media catalogues have been combined from once separate production and distribution companies. But large volume content management is not an insurmountable problem. The first priority for any content owner or rights holder should be to bring everything under management so that you understand what content is in the library. Connect the MAM to the media, wherever it is, and have it register the material, generate a visible browse version, and hoover up as much metadata as you can find.  If there really is no data, a simple microservice program can automatically generate metadata based on the information contained in your filenames. You might be surprised by how far this will take you.

2. Nobody move anything, until you know what it is.

An end-to-end media supply chain is not synonymous with the cloud. Your media and the workflows involved in creating, managing and delivering content across various platforms and tools can be controlled and observable whether it’s in the cloud, on the ground (on-prem’) or any combination of the two. Bringing media under management doesn’t mean moving it to the cloud or anywhere else. Once you’ve registered the assets and made them visible  (see point 1 above) you can make an informed, value based, business decision as to where the most appropriate place is for them to be stored.  Too often we hear media execs talking about their cloud strategy rather than the business strategy and ‘the cloud’ as an outcome whereas it should be viewed as a component – albeit an extremely powerful component – of a business objective. 

3. Clean as you go.

Cloud services can deliver significant flexibility and efficiency. Equally, storing material in cloud storage has accessibility and security benefits.  But cloud storage is definitely not the least expensive option.  So, if you choose to migrate your content into the cloud, it’s worth getting your housekeeping done before you make the move.  First understand what you have, what condition it’s in, what the likely value is, and what rights you hold.  Other simple housekeeping tasks such as material deduplication or identifying minutes of colour black run out from a digitised tape, or camera pointing at ground rushes can also be carried out with the material in situ.  The 90’s broadcast engineers’ joke of operators inadvertently archiving hundreds of hours of colour bars isn’t quite so funny when you move from a $10/TB LTO to incrementally priced cloud storage.

For this reason, we tend to support a controlled migration of content and workflows to the cloud rather than the ‘forklift content and sort it out when it gets there’ approach.

4. You don’t need to shut down existing systems to modernise your operation.

Your ‘legacy’ systems can, and probably do, still deliver value. There’s no need to change your entire technology ecosystem just because you want to introduce new tools, streamline your workflows or take advantage of cloud scale. In a constantly developing technology landscape, the best approach is to integrate, not deprecate. Your MAM orchestration platform should integrate with both legacy and new technologies so that existing systems can continue to deliver value while new tools – such as AI applications – can be readily incorporated into workflows to support ever changing business needs.  At Blue Lucy we achieve this by using our BLAM microservice architecture to connect disparate systems and enable a controlled migration to modern workflows.

5. It doesn’t matter where the content is. No, really.

The actual location of your content should have no bearing on your ability to monetize it. Your MAM should provide easy and uniform access to all your assets, no matter where the ops’ team or the media is physically located.  On-prem and cloud storage should be viewed interchangeably rather than one being for operations, such as fulfilment, and the other for the “safety copy” because your MAM ‘knows’ where the material is and can be configured to use the most appropriate repository. And, if your operation is all cloud, then the need for a “safety copy” is moot as the cloud vendor can provide multi-copy resilient storage through simple configuration.  80% of Blue Lucy BLAM deployments are hybrid and use both cloud and ground storage.

6. Start small and work incrementally.                   

Big bang “Transformation” projects are dead, and good riddance.  Big projects cost big money, carry big risk and often end up in big disappointment (when they’re not quietly killed).  Even the successful ones take a long time to deliver value, and the true RoI rarely moves the needle on the CFO’s dashboard, certainly after the long-departed big consultancy company fees are included.

Instead, big projects can be delivered in small steps using modern service-based technology and open APIs.  That’s why we recommend focussing projects on end-to-end solutions for a thin, horizontal operational slice.  This approach proves the technology and the business case with minimal risk and delivers measurable value incrementally, building confidence with each slice and allowing a rapid change of direction if necessary. If your service provider or vendor can’t demonstrate value within 6 weeks of any project starting, you may want to reconsider working with them.

Interested in learning how Blue Lucy’s BLAM and BOLT platforms can help you save money in 2025?  Get in touch!

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.