ITV Uses Telestream Cloud Services to Prepare for BritBox UK on Amazon Prime Channels

Migration to Cloud enables ten-fold increase in media processing capabilities at UK’s premier independent commercial broadcaster

Nevada City, California(16 Apr 2021)

Telestream, a leading provider of workflow automation, media processing, quality monitoring and test and measurement solutions for the production and distribution of video, has announced a major contract with the UK’s premier independent commercial broadcaster, ITV. The project sees ITV migrating many of its current on-premise media processing operations into the Cloud while establishing new cloud-based media processing operations for preparation of BritBox UK VoD content on Amazon Prime Video Channels.

Commencing pre-pandemic, ITV started bringing in-house a range of content processing operations that had previously been provided by a third-party service. The creative team in ITV’s Leeds facility was expanded to accommodate any craft edits, while the team was faced with the need to rapidly scale up content encoding and packaging workloads. Cloud based services were the only practical solution for ITV, and after evaluation of several alternatives, ITV selected the Telestream Cloud solution and worked with Telestream’s team to onboard a cloud-based workflow for their own content.

The Telestream Cloud team was able to configure the ITV workflows in a very short space of time by porting ITV’s existing Telestream Vantage workflows, resulting in a painless and quick migration to the cloud services. Additional requirements from ITV have been managed in a prompt and efficient way by Telestream.

ITV is expanding its use of Telestream Cloud Services for content processing as their VoD requirements grow in support of the B2C digital strategy. A recent increase in workload included encoding over 7000 hours of content for the launch of BritBox UK on Amazon Prime Video Channels.  With a very short time available to process this content, the Telestream Cloud Service’s ability to run massive parallel processing has been invaluable, with up to 300 concurrent sessions being initiated to allow encoding of over 200 long-form media assets per hour.

Selecting Telestream as its technology partner on this project has allowed ITV to deploy its existing pre-approved Vantage workflows for new platform deliveries in remarkably short times and with little or no risk.

During the pandemic, ITV also purchased Telestream’s GLIM remote media player, which allows remote staff to view and validate content directly from AWS S3 storage without the need for downloading proxy versions, which vastly improves their remote working efficiency. GLIM was built to solve well known remote work challenges – to be a superior experience to the ‘remote desktop/virtual desktop’ play back experience, and to prevent remote employees wasting hours every day downloading mezzanine grade media files.

“Telestream’s involvement in assisting ITV to migrate to cloud processing from a large on-prem existing estate shows our intentions to move with our customers’ needs and to continue our joint partnership,” commented Benjamin Desbois, Senior Vice President and Chief Sales Officer at Telestream.  “Telestream has always been a key part of ITV’s platform and moving to Telestream Cloud continues that relationship with a long roadmap of new features which will further assist ITV in their vision.”

“Telestream’s broad range of cloud solutions gives us alternative options without having to retrain, re-skill or adapt any of our existing and proved outputs for multiple platform deliveries,” commented James French, Content Processing Team Lead at ITV. “This is a key feature that has saved us time and money from day one.  Telestream’s biggest asset is that its tools can be used agnostically across all major public cloud providers.”