BeIN Sports improves your productivity with Object Matrix and Vizrt

Viz One and Object Matrix Storage streamline workflows for the sports channel beIN Sports broadcast from Mediapro US.

With many live sports around the world suspended, sports channels and production companies are scrambling to create new shows from repurposed content. This has given renewed value to the multi-faceted media asset management (MAM) systems, storage and collaboration workflows that have been deployed to generate revenue and meet pent-up viewer demand for sports content.

In 2012, beIN Sports, which produces three channels for the US market—two linear, in English and Spanish, and an OTT channel called beIN Sports Connect, began its US operations in Miami from a full-service production facility owned by Mediapro US and equipped with technical staff.

Although there are no live events, the staff of 70 journalists/producers/editors uses nearline and archive resources daily to produce a wide variety of fresh content. This includes a series of classic LaLiga football matches with new commentary provided by live broadcasters as voice-over to describe the action with a new perspective. It also covers other sports, such as tennis, MLW, and even teqball (a combination of soccer and table tennis).

Mediapro US has implemented with the help of Unitecnic and 15,000-hour content repository based on a solution MAM Viz One by Vizrt and a private cloud MatrixStore of Object Matrix. This highly flexible combination provides fast, unlimited access to all media assets in multiple ways, depending on the project at hand, and can be easily expanded when needed without any performance degradation. And like him object storage It is the same technology that enables the public cloud, providing beIN Sports and Mediapro's other clients with an extremely cost-effective, fast and highly scalable environment from which to streamline their internal workflows. The faster beIN Sports editors access content, the sooner finished programs will air.

Ismael Marcer, Head of Operations and Technical Services at Mediapro U.S., states that “it was important to deploy a system that would not limit beIN Sports and what they are trying to do on a daily basis.” And he adds that the Vizrt-Object Matrix solution was implemented especially for beIN Sports, although other Mediapro clients in Miami – DirectTV Latin America, ESPN and Hola! TV – use a similar production storage system configuration. In fact, the facility that beIN Sports now calls home includes two additional studios. A second facility, with four studios right next door, opened in 2014.

"We had confidence in Vizrt, knowing them from many previous projects abroad, and in Object Matrix, because we wanted to implement the latest and most flexible storage system. Both had the best technical solution that fit our needs and also at a reasonable cost," he says.

The beIN Sports joint solution now supports a automated content storage which allows them to place the most used assets on the object storage array for nearline use and older assets on the Viz One for later use. Due to the sports rights licenses owned by beIN Sports, some content comes with a usage time limit, so the deployed temporary archive (the data is not permanent) knows exactly when to delete the content when it can no longer be legally used. This self-management technology, along with automated workflow integration, enables a rapid return on investment.

“This type of automated digital library is something you can't do with LTO tape storage,” Marcer notes. "It really helps when you have so many assets and then new ones come in all the time. This allows the beIN Sports team to focus on creativity and not worry about where the assets are stored. They want them when they need them, so we make sure this is possible at all times, while also strictly adhering to rights issues."