Turner EMEA reduces costs and reduces editing time by 70% with Sony solutions

Turner has increased efficiency, increasing the number of transcodings by 56% completed each year and allowing creation of 48% more on-demand television materials, mobile devices and online.

Sony is helping Turner EMEA Automate your content and asset management workflows in a time of constant business change by implementing an agile approach to developing software-based systems. This allows Turner to realize a significant return on its technology investments and ultimately deliver its content to viewers more quickly and across multiple platforms.

Turner, a Time Warner company, delivers its brands to viewers in the EMEA region through linear channels, as well as web, on-demand TV, DVD, gaming, mobile, merchandising, and publishing or emerging platforms. Its catalog of children's, entertainment, sports and news brands includes Cartoon Network, Boomerang, Cartoonito, Boing, Adult Swim, Toonami, Warner TV, TCM and TNT, CNN, Great Big Story, Bleacher Report and e-League, in addition to the new bet Toonix, in collaboration with HBO Nordic, and the film streaming service FilmStruck. In the EMEA region, Turner currently operates 69 channels, in 20 languages ​​and 125 countries.

Within Turner, this asset management team is known as Turner Media Center (TMC).

The benefits of TMC are multiple, explains Rob Cranfield, Turner's multimedia supply chain director for its EMEA technology and operations group. “By enabling a file-based workflow for compliance teams, the TMC has reduced editing time by 70% from the company, saving money and allowing you to stream content faster than ever. At the same time, through the integration of existing and legacy media files into the TMC, users in the EMEA region can now search, view, edit and distribute to content providers more than 500,000 media assets, 93,000 hours of SD content and 24,600 hours of HD content," he notes. In addition, the TMC has increased efficiency, increasing the number of transcodings by 56% completed each year and allowing creation of 48% more on-demand television materials, mobile and online, which suits Turner EMEA's expansion into more cross-platform offerings.

The agile development agreement provides Turner with a set number of available “ideal developer days.” This allows you to decide the functionality needed for the TMC and receive new code from the Sony team every month. This code is then deployed to the live system, where the features can be shown to users and tested. Once the users are satisfied, the project moves to the next phase.

This approach allows Sony to identify what can be automated gradually, saving time and reducing manual costs with each adjustment, rather than waiting months for finished features, fixes and updates. From Turner's perspective, this allows us to analyze the domestic market. A feature can be added to the TMC without spending large amounts of time and money on development. This way, users quickly have the opportunity to verify that the added functionality is what they originally requested.

Matt Bowers, responsable del equipo de soluciones profesionales del departamento de ingeniería profesional europeo de Sony, considera que la estrategia ágil ha “devuelto el control del proyecto al cliente”, lo que también ha permitido a Turner mantener el control de los costes.