The project, managed by CTM Solutions, was aimed at importing, organising, managing, and putting at OPTV’s disposal all the necessary files for the broadcast and promotion of films and programmes, whilst ensuring a secure and intelligent storage for all of those elements. It needed to manage the masters, trailers, XML techniques, the subtitling files, and the associated promotional material.
A Rising Deluge of Content
Ultimately, as with all content, the most important thing is being able to maximise value. With a growing catalogue of assets, it was becoming increasingly challenging for OPTV to find the right content and therefore distribute it to the right channels at the right time. Of course, sheer volumes also meant the archive system needed replacing with one that would be scalable and therefore able to grow as OPTV continues to add to the asset library.
Keeping that content secure was key, with a vast amount of high profile content. Ensuring it couldn’t be accessed by anyone other than those with appropriate rights, especially before transmission, was important, whilst ensuring the correct people could easily access the content needed. At the same time, OPTV was looking to automate workflows as much as possible, such as automatic delivery to service providers, to make those processes much more efficient, saving valuable time and reducing any risk of error. It was equally important for the OPTV team to maintain operational autonomy for managing the group’s catalogue and archive.
A Winning Combination
CTM Solutions brought in two solutions to respond to this: a Media Asset Management solution, Cantemo Portal and a secure Digital Content Governance platform, MatrixStore from Object Matrix. Both solutions are flexible and easily integrate with third party solutions and systems, making them not only great for the job at hand, but also able to work together, and with the rest of OPTV’s workflow, seamlessly.
Eric Grapinet, Technical Director, OPTV explains: “We were looking for a powerful solution, that would be future proof in terms of accessing content, could scale in line with our business needs, with good processing power, that is simple to deploy, and which we could use autonomously. With more than 30,000 assets to manage, security was also at the heart of our decision. We chose the combination of Cantemo and Object Matrix and we have entrusted the integration to CTM Solutions.”
A Phased Approach
The first phase of the project was about meeting a number of initial demands mentioned above to improve the management, discoverability of assets, and automation of workflows. Lapins Bleus Conseil was tasked with integrating Portal into OPTV’s existing infrastructure. Having thoroughly evaluated the way in which OPTV needed the system to work, it was able to create a number of custom workflows within Portal and a customised dashboard. This included a very specific workflow for content ingest and customised navigation tools. OPTV had a number of complex task sequences, which Lapins Bleus Conseil was able to reduce to a simple click. By also integrating share-IT from the software company Automate-IT, Portal has been seamlessly integrated with Adobe Photoshop CC, making it easy for the creative editors to collaborate within Portal.
With those custom workflows in place, Portal drastically improved OPTV’s workflow, making assets much more easily discoverable and workflows more efficient. However, after several months, it became apparent that the existing LTO-based archiving infrastructure was not able to meet OPTV’s current and future demands. Having evaluated the needs of the users and the various options, OPTV decided to migrate to a secure object-based storage system. MatrixStore from Object Matrix was chosen and CTM handled the integration with Portal.
Eric Grapinet continues: “We now have a large range of options and flexibility to efficiently handle up to two thousand new programmes every year, thanks to the integration and control possibilities using Portal and MatrixStore APIs. We can easily edit files within Portal, add additional metadata and interrogate metadata using the MatrixStore APIs. We are now equipped to support rapid international growth of content consumption.”
Once the migration was completed and operational at the new Orange Gardens campus, OPTV implemented a business continuity platform installing a second MatrixStore petabyte cluster, situated in a remote data centre and operated by Orange. MatrixStore native replication functionality enables this to be done automatically.
Pierre le Berrigaud, Commercial Director, CTM Solutions, explains : “We have been working with OPTV for the past three years, and are proud to be continuing to help it build a solid technical infrastructure to better serve its clients’ needs. The combination of Portal and Object Matrix, combined with a number of custom integrations will ensure not only more efficient workflows, but also a future proof and scalable system for OPTV.”
