ISG: Streamlining Media Workflows in European Football Broadcasts
Football is the biggest and most popular sport in the world, with billions of fans who regularly watch their favorite teams either in person or on a broadcast. A source of joy (and sometimes heartache) to many people, football is also a massive business that relies on broadcast and digital content to promote the sport.
ISG are the exclusive suppliers of multi-format transcode and global delivery of all sponsor based promotional videos for Europe’s most prestigious football leagues. Headquartered in the UK, ISG provides cutting-edge cloud-based solutions for international broadcast play-out distribution.
Working with systems integrator Digital Garage, ISG implemented JetStream high speed file transfer software to streamline and accelerate media workflows for the broadcast of dozens of European professional football matches every week.
The Challenge: Time-Sensitive, High Volume Media File Transfers with Contributors Across Europe
ISG creates promotional highlight packages from five major football competitions across Europe. The quantity of games and their dispersed locations present particular challenges for ISG. For example, the 90-110 minute games are filmed in HD or 4K resolution with up to 84 games in one week occurring at different times in many countries. ISG works with broadcasters all over Europe who film the matches and then send the media files to ISG for processing. Due to the volume of time-sensitive data, ISG requires fast, robust, reliable file transfer software that is easy for contributors to use.
The Solution: Tokenized Shared Folders for File Uploads
With 20 years of experience offering end-to-end audio, video, file-based workflow design, post-production, and broadcast solutions, Digital Garage is the ideal technology provider. By partnering with JetStream, Digital Garage could help introduce more efficiency to ISG workflows.
Digital Garage created a workflow for ISG with JetStream accelerated file transfer software as an integral part of the design. Without having to go through a time-consuming process of creating new user logins for each broadcaster as might have been the case for other file transfer products, Digital Garage employed JetStream’s tokenized shared folder functionality.
Shared folder links with optional expiry dates and passphrases can be easily created with a simple right-click in the JetStream client application.
Digital Garage sent each broadcaster different links to shared folders organized by each major football competition. Thus, contributors can quickly and easily upload their videos directly to the JetStream server with footage sent in two batches – once at halftime, then after the game. From that point, ISG can transfer the files to a video editing platform to create the highlight packages for a quick turnaround.
Since we have incorporated JetStream, we have seen immediate benefits…
The Result: Significant Time Savings
ISG is pleased to see a significant time savings with this workflow. They are now 30 – 35% more efficient because the files write directly to the shared storage connected to the JetStream server application.
In use now since the beginning of the European football season, broadcasters from 40 different countries have uploaded football games with no difficulty. The JetStream server has been capable of ingesting the media from many sources dispersed across the continent. With quick set-up and a seamless design, both ISG and the broadcasters have had a smooth transition from their previous system. Moreover, the workflow is transparent and users send files easily with a single click.
Paul Saint, Cloud & SaaS Solutions Architect at Digital Garage said, “ISG has been a client of Digital Garage for a number of years. They trust us to offer them the best solutions for their business. Since we have incorporated JetStream, we have seen immediate benefits especially over other products in the marketplace. In fact, past file transfer methods they used were ten times more expensive. ISG are seeing major cost savings in addition to the effectiveness of this enterprise grade file transfer software”.