For the large scale project of HBS to make its Professional Football League archive available through a video on demand portal, HBS asked BCE to enhance the mass digitisation as well as the on-going ingest.
Since 1999, Host Broadcast Services (HBS) offers expertise and experience in delivering images and sounds for some of the most prestigious sports events around the world. The company has rapidly developed as a renowned host broadcast specialist.
Holding the most important and still growing archive of the Professional Football League, HBS has developed a video on demand platform to make available this rich video content. HBS has selected BCE’s Digital Media Operations for the digitisation, viewing and transcoding of the content.
BCE’s Digital Media Operations are a complete set of services to digitise, enrich, store, transcode, edit and distribute its customer’s content. Completely file-based, the services are managed by BCE with its postproduction content management system, MediaCMS.
Within this project, BCE is using its digitisation, reception, viewing, processing and file-based distribution services. Perfectly integrated with HBS workflow, BCE ensures seamless operations on the archives.
Reception and Ingest
HBS has two main types of media, the tapes (Beta, Beta SX, HD Cam, etc.) and x-files drives. While the tapes are cleaned in the postproduction department and processed in our ingest automation solution Au2Ingest, the x-files drives, which are a proprietary format, are decrypted in a raw file.
“Au2Ingest automates the digitisation with the LMS, VTR and archives, this in-house development allows us to tailor-made the solution to the needs of HBS”, explains Xavier Thillen, Head of production and postproduction at BCE.
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The content is then made available on our MediaCMS. Thanks to a VPN key, the customer is able to connect to our MediaCMS, consult the files and approve the files for the next step.
“The MediaCMS is a fantastic tool that allows a direct connection between the customer and our process workflow, it accelerates our work and ensures the rapid availability of content for HBS”, says Claude Dublin, International Traffic Manager at BCE.
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Online editing tool
Thanks to MediaCMS, HBS can connect to its processed content, using a VPN access, and view its files online. While for complete Football games the customer uses the interface for validating the files only, for video stock, HBS use the online editing tool to create new files.
“The online editing tool is geared up with all the necessary features to create news clips. It is fast and intuitive”, comments HBS.
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Working on the low resolution file the system creates automatically the EDL and processes automatically the raw files in BCE’s transcoding farm. Once created, the clips appear in the MediaCMS for validation and indexation.
Mastering and distribution
Once the files have been transcoded and the new masters have been created, the MediaCMS will automatically create a low resolution file and send via Movie2Me, BCE’s high speed file-based distribution system, to a cloud-based archive belonging to HBS.
“Digitising the Professional Football League archives and make them available in an online portal is the beginning of our transition to content exchange. The archives of our clients must not sleep on a shelf; they must live and be available for the clubs. This project has come alive with the support of the high professionalism of BCE.” Concludes Philippe Oziol at HBS.
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