BBC Studios picks Blue Lucy’s BLAM for agile media operations, collaboration and delivery

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.”

Read the case study here