FOX Sports
Winning Big - How FOX Sports reached unprecedented heights with pixitmedia and Telestream
Telestream joins forces with pixitmedia to deliver rapid media discovery capabilities for FOX Sports global production workflows.
FOX Sports is a long-term collaborator with pixitmedia. A global sports broadcasting giant, they are regarded as the unofficial “home” of US sports, such as American football, baseball, and hockey. FOX Sports challenged pixitmedia to take on their immense content archive; with hundreds of petabytes of heritage sports footage that sat on tape and accrued ongoing costs to maintain and manage.
The challenge
The primary goal was to turn the archive from a cost center into a revenue source by transitioning to the cloud and automated seamless search. FOX Sports wanted to bring value to their wealth of content by making it instantly organized and easily accessible to users regardless of location, all while minimizing the cost of migrating the entire archive into the cloud.
Along with transcoding their existing archive, FOX Sports also continues to generate thousands of hours of content across multiple channels, so the solution they adopted needed to be fast, accessible, and scalable.
The pixitmedia team worked closely with transcoding software specialists Telestream to formulate a custom integration for FOX Sports, harnessing pixstor Search and Telestream’s Vantage software.
The customized plugin enables FOX Sports to control rapid media discovery capabilities across multi-petabyte production storage systems, including their content archive.
By integrating pixstor Search with their Telestream Vantage transcoder farm, FOX Sports is now able to quickly find the assets they need using the powerful pixstor Search capabilities. The solution was an instant success, with pixstor Search presenting viewable content files, accessible even on their way to the cloud, to give editors and creatives immediate, seamless control.
Demonstrated by the FOX Sports Archive transition, pixstor Search as a stand-alone feature is powerful, but when combined with third-party tools, such as AI, transcoders, or MAMs, pixstor Search becomes invaluable.
The pixstor Vantage magic, explained
When any new or existing FOX media assets are worked on, pixstor Search ingests and extracts key metadata from each file. This information determines whether proxies/thumbnails are needed, based on the FOX automated workflow policies.
These functions are all automatically performed via the REST API interface between pixstor Search and Telestream Vantage. Telestream Vantage then creates low-resolution proxies/ thumbnails from the media assets in situ and delivers these back to pixstor Search.
When handling thousands of hours of content, the FOX Sports team can now rapidly find the assets they need in a high-pressure, fast-paced operation. By creating this open architecture, pixstor Search can also easily integrate with and utilize other tools within FOX Sports’ environment.
Going the Distance
The pixitmedia team has a reputation for smart collaboration and customer first solutions, as demonstrated by the efficient and highly productive collaboration with Telestream.
pixitmedia’s solution-focused, consultative approach enabled us, once again, to deliver groundbreaking success to our customer and further strengthen the business relationship.
While the challenges are different among all of our pixstor projects, the overarching principles of any pixstor project remain the same. We connect technologies together to automate and streamline our customers’ challenging processes for the better, while always ensuring that any new solution provides real value to the business.
