Blue Lucy

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.   

When one of the world’s biggest independent television and multimedia distributors moved their content catalogue in-house, they chose Blue Lucy’s BLAM for archive and media fulfilment operations management. 

Banijay Group is the world’s largest independent content creation group for television and multimedia platforms.  Banijay Rights is the group’s international distribution division and is responsible for storing, managing and distributing the more than 200,000 hours of content in the group’s content catalogue encompassing 130+ labels.  Having moved the storage and management of their content library in-house, Banijay Rights needed to bring the archive under secure management and streamline operations with automation and task management. 

“Banijay Rights sits in a different space in the market to a traditional broadcaster because, although they have a large inventory to manage, their delivery timelines are generally measured in days or weeks as opposed to newsrooms that are expected to deliver content in seconds,” explains consultant, Mark Glennon who was contracted by Banijay Rights to manage this project. “Enterprise MAMs that offer broadcast fail-safes as standard generally cost hundreds of thousands of pounds and can’t shrink below a certain size, while products like the BLAM fill a void by providing core functionality in a cost-effective solution that can scale up if they need it to.”

The BLAM implementation provides a complete process workflow orchestration capability – from the creation of media products (placeholders) from the rights management system, to the ingest and QC of media through editing, archive management, publication of screeners and delivery; all controlled through a simple browser-based user interface.  To fully realise the benefits of workflow automation, integration with key systems has been a key aspect of the project.

BLAM’s integration with the content rights management software

The key business system integration is the with the content rights management software, EasyTrack (ET).

A BLAM workflow polls ET at a given interval to check for any new content titles added resulting from new content deals or commissions. From these, a media structure, based on the number of series and episodes for a given title, is created in BLAM, and any metadata fields common between the systems are automatically populated. In BLAM, metadata is inherited within the hierarchy derived from ET.

The BLAM tracks both physical (DVD and video tape) and file based assets with the import of the latter being automated through watch-folders.  When assets are imported, the media handling workflow – which includes both process automation and user task management – is triggered.

The Banijay Rights team manually match media to the titles using the BLAM browser-based video players (which include features such as multichannel audio monitoring.) As part of this workflow, the team also enriches the content metadata, using controlled vocabularies to drive accuracy and on-screen feedback to ensure the data is complete.  This workflow includes mandatory fields which operators must complete before the workflow moves on.

This tight integration ensured that both the media rights and media management system are synchronised at all times which saves operator time and ensures accuracy.

“The integration of the rights management system with media and operations management is one of the biggest benefits we’ve seen from this implementation,” explains Glennon. “Banijay is an amalgamation of many different companies and being able to put all their content into one library and use EasyTrack integration to expose all this material to their sales team will make it much easier to market and sell their inventory.”

Integration with quality control software

For quality assurance, the BLAM connector for Telestream VidCheck is used to automate the QC process.  A suite of QC tests is executed on all material ingested into the system and the results passed back to BLAM as time-code delineated data as well as a .pdf report.  Any errors or warnings raised by VidCheck are highlighted in the BLAM Baseband player timeline within the browser-based interface.  This allows operators to quickly seek within the material to identified issues and provide an ‘eyes on’ check using a baseband grading monitor.

Cloud storage management and integration with AWS

In terms of media management, operations are automated where possible and workflow driven.   All material that enters the system is copied by the BLAM to the nearline (spinning disk) storage, and a safety copy is uploaded to one of two AWS S3 buckets.   BLAM manages the spinning disk and – when a given threshold is reached – material that has not been accessed for the longest period is deleted. Naturally, as part of that automated workflow, BLAM re-checks that the safety copy is secure in AWS S3 before deletion.

For all archived material, the browser-ready proxy material (created by the BLAM at the point of ingest) is always kept on-line. This allows operators to search for and view content before triggering fulfilment workflows such as full format content delivery or publishing to the Banijay media sales portal as a screener.

“As a rule, the Banijay Rights team does a lot of work in the first six to nine months after material arrives and then seldom touch it again,” says Glennon.  “The cloud archiving model works really well as they don’t need constant access to the original content, but can easily restore it when it is needed.”

The data migration headache

In order to overcome the perennial challenge of data migration, Banijay Rights invested in an AWS Snowball transport solution.   The content catalogue is vast and a straightforward upload of material, even with file acceleration, would have taken some time – too long to support the business continuity strategy.  The archive was simply copied to the Snowball and transferred by AWS to an additional, temporary S3 Bucket. When the BLAM workflow runs to make the S3 safety copy of incoming media, the Bucket is queried first. If the media is matched, BLAM manages the transfer to the long-term storage Bucket rather than uploading from the on-premise disk storage. BLAM natively supports bringing disparate content stores under management in this way.

“The BLAM’s integration with AWS S3 provides Banijay Rights with a hybrid cloud / ground archive of their entire content catalogue which is both low cost and secure,” explains Blue Lucy founder Julian Wright.  “The Banijay Rights BLAM system demonstrates the significant operational and business benefits of integrating systems to streamline media operations management.”

“One of the reasons we chose BLAM was because the team were so flexible and amenable,” concludes Glennon.  “They’re really open to suggestions and easy to work with to solve problems.  We almost went with another system but our experience has been very good and I’m confident we made the right choice.”

Richard Clarke, International Programme Servicing Manager for Banijay Rights concludes, “In an increasingly complex digital world where the volume and size of files that we manage is growing exponentially, a MAM is a key piece of infrastructure for a business like ours.   The Blue Lucy team have listened to our requirements and we’re confident BLAM will provide a solution that exceeds our expectations.”