Turner International has cut their costs and reduced the edit time by 70% by working closely with Sony
"By enabling a file-based workflow for the compliance teams, TMC has reduced edit time at Turner by 70%, saving money and allowing content to be aired quicker than before."
Rob Cranfield
Director, Media Supply Chain
Turner, a Time Warner Company
Committed to innovation and development, Turner, a Time Warner company, brings its brands to audiences across the EMEA region via linear channels as well as the web, VOD, DVD, gaming, mobile, merchandising, publishing or emerging platforms. Its portfolio of kids’, 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, as well as new ventures Toonix, in partnership with HBO Nordic, and movie streaming service FilmStruck. In the EMEA region, Turner currently operates 69 channels in 20 languages in 125 countries. Installed across its various European offices, Sony’s platform coordinates different systems and services, including some from third parties, as part of the end-to-end workflow: receiving, preparing, packaging and delivering content, tracking it along the way. This process involves, among other things, legal compliance, editing, dubbing, subtitling and packaging, the foundation for which is Turner EMEA’s file-based workflow and asset management system based on Sony’s orchestration and integration platform. Within Turner, this asset management setup is known as the Turner Media Center (TMC).
Sony's Platform
Installed across its various European offices, Sony’s platform coordinates different systems and services, including some from third parties, as part of the end-to-end workflow: receiving, preparing, packaging and delivering content, tracking it along the way. Importantly, it has also helped to increase automation, freeing teams up for the growing volume of content that it needs to process. Within Turner, this asset management setup is known as the Turner Media Center (TMC).
Turner Media Center
The benefits of the TMC are manifold, explains Turner’s Rob Cranfield, Director of Media Supply Chain for its EMEA Tech & Ops group; “By enabling a file-based workflow for the compliance teams, TMC has reduced edit time at Turner by 70%, saving money and allowing content to be aired quicker than before. At the same time, by integrating existing and legacy media archives into TMC, users across EMEA are now able to search, view, edit and distribute to content providers over 500,000 media assets, 93,000 hours of SD content and 24,600 hours of HD content. The improved time to market, coupled with the cost and time benefits that allow us to focus more on processing the greater volumes of content we are now handling, are great benefits to us as we continue to grow our portfolio of services.” Among other advantages, this also allows Turner to deliver its content across many different genres to multiple markets in multiple languages at the same time. The TMC has increased efficiency too, upping the number of transcodes completed each year by 56%, and making it possible to create 48% more VOD/mobile/online deliverables, in line with Turner EMEA’s expansion into more multiplatform propositions. Uniquely, unlike some software development projects, TMC was not implemented in the traditional way of ‘specify, design, build, deliver.’ Instead, to allow Turner additional flexibility and to ensure that it can quickly react to change and realize any business benefits, an agile approach has been adopted to serve Turner’s evolving needs.
Developer Days
The agile agreement gives Turner a set number of available ‘ideal developer days.’ This allows it to decide on the required functionality for the TMC and then receive new code from Sony’s team each month. This code is then deployed into the live system, where the features can be shown to users and tested. Once users are happy, the project moves onto the next stage. This approach allows Sony to pinpoint what can be automated in an incremental fashion, saving time and reducing manual costs with each tweak, rather than waiting months for finished features, fixes and updates. From Turner’s perspective, it allows it to test the internal market. A feature can be added to the TMC without huge amounts of time and money being spent on development. The users then quickly get the chance to check that the delivered functionality is what they asked for in the first place. The alternative, and the way that many software systems are traditionally developed, is that programmers spend many months developing something that may not turn out exactly as the user wanted.
Low-risk Updates
Of course, delivering continual change to a live software-based system that is in constant use presents certain challenges. To address this, Sony has devised working practices to minimize the risks. These include: delivering changes in small, incremental chunks; testing in the customer environment; offering regular opportunities for expert users to review and share feedback before going live; and daily communication between teams. In 2017, a number of new features were successfully added to the live system in this way, including the ability to mix, match and manipulate assets and permissions for third parties to automatically request missing material. Among the features due to be added next is an integrated promo workflow, a remote editing workflow allowing near-instant access to content and automatic correction of some content. This allows Turner’s operations to be location-independent and also responsive to changing work patterns, as employees can work both on-site or remotely.
If Turner needs to change direction because their business priorities have changed, they can do so without going through a lengthy change control process or contract renegotiation. Similarly, working in an agile way, there is no need to commit to huge development costs upfront that have an unpredictable return. Instead, they can show the cost and benefit to their business incrementally, reporting back to their stakeholders each month and showing the new value that has been added.
Matt Bowers
Head of Professional Solutions, Sony European Professional Engineering
Ongoing Partnership
Sony and Turner have committed to working together like this for an extended period so that both parties can follow the process through and readily adapt as required, depending on future needs. It is a partnership that is working well for both parties, illustrating the benefits of agile working and allowing Turner to bring its fans more content more quickly across more platforms, and proving that Sony can be nimble, user-focused and ultimately affordable—providing software solutions to customers with a significant return on their investment.
