Blue Lucy wins Blue Ant Media contract for media supply chain automation

International production studio, rights business and channel operator, Blue Ant Media, has chosen Blue Lucy’s BLAM platform for media supply chain automation.

The multi-year contract announced today follows a competitive discovery process involving various vendors and a rigorous proof of concept in collaboration with independent technology consultants, Chromata Solutions.

Headquartered in Toronto, with offices in Los Angeles, New York, Singapore, London, Washington and Sydney, Blue Ant Media creates and distributes a premium slate of programming across all content genres. The group also operates free streaming and pay TV channels under several media brands internationally, distributing their programming to licenses all around the world in various languages and formats. Blue Ant delivers thousands of hours of content internationally every month, but their ability to rapidly respond to new business opportunities was limited by manual processes. To this end, they engaged digital asset management and content ecosystem consultants, Chromata Solutions, to help identify and implement workflow automation solutions. After an extensive assessment of Blue Ant’s requirements and the vendor landscape, and a successful proof of concept evaluation, Blue Lucy’s BLAM was selected for media supply chain management and automation.   

Julian Wright, CEO of Blue Lucy said, “Manual workflows have become prohibitively expensive and time consuming for content creators and owners like Blue Ant Media who face the challenges of increasing distribution platforms, expanding deliverable requirements and pressure to respond quickly to new business opportunities.  BLAM’s selection by Blue Ant is a real testament to the power and capability of the platform and the team that supports it. We’re excited to help transform Blue Ant’s workflows over the coming years.”

BLAM is running in a hybrid deployment model for Blue Ant Media. The core database and services are provided as a managed service from Blue Lucy, but a number of the BLAM Workflow Runner engines are deployed on-premise, managing local resources for editing and the existing LTO library supported by XenData. Cloud storage is used for fulfilment and as the repository for browse media so that content is globally accessible. BLAM is integrated across the group’s technology stack (including Signiant Media Shuttle, Telestream Vantage and VidChecker, Adobe Premiere Pro, amongst others) to facilitate automated content delivery – so a content sale entered into the rights management system automatically triggers BLAM to pull all of the associated assets, transcode the media where necessary and deliver the files to the client without user intervention. Where manual processes such as edits, reviews and approvals are required as part of an automated workflow, BLAM automatically creates work orders, makes the content available in the appropriate tools and notifies relevant team members about required tasks. 

“BLAM is incredibly sophisticated product that, we believe, represents the future of MAM software,” said Vlad Storchak, VP of technology at Blue Ant Media. “It’s an extensive platform but the various capabilities can be rolled out incrementally, so we don’t have to scope the entire use-case out from the outset. Instead, we can deploy critical workflows quickly and start realising business value while we plan our next steps. We also enjoyed working with the Blue Lucy team – the combination of their support and the fact that our team will be empowered to create workflows independently provides the flexibility we need to respond to changing market needs.”