With a global operation that spans the US East and West coasts, Mumbai, London and Singapore, and advertisers from all over the world, the movement of media is the lifeblood of our organization. We needed to centralize our media library while also streamlining syndication, ad approvals, and promotion.

Simultaneously we wanted to reduce costs, risks, and shipping time of the physical media to our worldwide partners. We soon realized that a cloud-based workflow was the best solution to reaching our goals.

A cloud-based workflow

We selected the Aframe cloud video collaboration platform. It replaced our outdated and expensive physical delivery system while improving our review process.

Being an India-based company, we work a lot with colleagues in Delhi, Mumbai, and Noida, and getting drives in and out of customs is a nightmare. The cloud solution eliminates that issue, resulting in huge savings in shipping costs. Most importantly, we no longer wait for hard drives and tapes to reach their destinations or worry about damage or data corruption.

Our entire library is stored on the cloud platform. If clients want something in its original format, we just send them a link and the delivery is done. The cloud platform also stores our audio stems, scripts, and other items that are part of a syndication package.

Our Aframe seats are spread evenly worldwide and used to accomplish many different tasks. In Los Angeles our creative team uses the system to preview shows and find clips to create promos. In New York, the sales team uses the system to receive ads from clients, review and approve them. The staff then forwards approved links to me, which get sent off for broadcast.

Overseas, our syndication teams use the same platform to download lower resolution clips to iPads for use in client meetings. Uploads can happen from any location, and we particularly like giving ad content creators ftp “upload-only” access which doesn’t take up any of our user seats.

The house standard format is XDCAM 50 MXF but we work with many other standards because 3rd party productions may deliver material ranging from ProRes to MP4. What’s great about the Aframe cloud solution is that it just handles them all, ingesting and also automatically transcoding to a proxy that sales executives can view to confirm content and then send to me for transcode to whatever broadcast standard is needed.

Versatile cloud solution

With a fast-moving, collaborative worldwide process in place, Asia TV USA is now expanding to Z Living offshoots in Latin America, Russia and Dubai. The content will be a combination of some programming originally in Hindi and some originally in English. We’re making NTSC and PAL versions of our entire library in unmixed format so we can overdub in Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic and Russian.

The first step happens in Mumbai where teams there create the unmixed content and upload to Aframe. The Miami team will then translate it and upload the new VO back into the cloud. The New Jersey staff will pull the content back down, compile and return it to the cloud for broadcast.

We anticipate that as the translation piece of the project progresses, the team will also make heavy use of cloud platform’s ability to provide metadata with attached clips. We now have created truly a worldwide workflow. I can’t imagine how we could run our current operations or drive our push into Latin America without utilizing the Aframe cloud-based platform.