Having secured broadcasting rights for the 2018-2024 Olympics, Discovery realized the need for a totally new workflow. No broadcaster had rights of this scope before.  NEP’s Mediabank cloud-based media management system proved to be the best tool to facilitate Content linking, live MCR, ingest, craft editing of highlights, automated clip generation, storage of content, distribution of live content and clips, a signal hub, an audio matrix and 24/7 monitoring and support for 4,000 hours of Olympic content.

The 2018 Winter Olympics marked Discovery’s first of four Olympic Games with broadcasting rights for most of Europe, and they needed to build a complete solution, from the ground up to deliver all of the Olympic content to 50 territories across Europe in 21 languages.  They knew that one of their main challenges was going to be managing the tremendous volume of content coming in from Korea and out to all of their distribution channels.  With 900 people on the ground in PyeongChang and 1400 people across 10 sites in Europe, immediate access to content from anywhere in the world, with easy collaboration and content sharing was going to be critical. NEP worked with Discovery to build out their Mediabank cloud-based media asset management tool to create a custom solution for their ingest, storage, logging, distribution, and collaboration needs. 

Intuitive

At it’s core, NEP’s Mediabank is a cloud-based toolbox with an extremely intuitive and user-friendly interface that allows Discovery’s users to access their media from anywhere, anytime. They were able to search, process and distribute anything from their entire media library using their favorite browser on their own computer, tablet or phone.  Mediabank includes three distinct applications: AdEx, Library and Review & Approval.  AdEx, is the application that served as content courier for Discovery’s digital video files, promos and masters. It handled ingest, automatically performed quality checks and delivered their files in the correct pre-set format. When Discovery used AdEx to ingest content, they used a custom touch-screen application-based forms to ensure their files got the richest possible metadata. Review & Approval is the collaboration application that allowed Discovery’s entire team to share updates and comments clearly and quickly and move through the approval process efficiently. They used it to communicate real-time with to keep projects moving, annotate on material at any point during production, or give it a final check before going to air. Library is the application that served as a window to Discovery’s entire media library.  Rich with metadata, it offered a powerful search tool with the ability to share content with internal and external partners or publish directly to any destination.  It also offered the ability to edit clips and set up scores of different automations. 

Content Linking

With a petabyte of capability, NEP’s custom Mediabank solution for Discovery was able to take 132 different commentaries into 1 single hub, sync video and sound, add virtual and augmented reality elements and make content available immediately with delay of less than 7 frames. Discovery’s Mediabank platform handled live ingest from OBS and Discovery’s team on the ground.  All content was immediate logged with rich metadata using a custom touch-screen live logging application and made immediately available to Discovery’s social media, digital and television editors - who were able to easily search through an entire library of content to find exactly what they needed.  Metadata from this live logging tool also allowed Mediabank to handle auto-clipping and automated distribution to digital and social platforms almost instantaneously. Through Mediabank, Discovery’s teams in PyeongChang and in Europe were able to make craft edits and clips of content, collaborate with colleagues around the world, manage review and approval of all content, push content out to publish across all of their platforms, and distribute to all of their external media partners. This solution included full redundancy with ingest at two discrete points, in Hilversum and Oslo.  Additionally, NEP worked with Discovery and incorporated several new features, including a custom live streaming player, integration directly into Mediabank of third-party collaboration tool Slack, and a mobile app for teams on the ground to instantly upload content to Discovery’s Olympic library from their phones.  

Back-End Gold Winner

At it’s peak, NEP’s Discovery Mediabank supported production in 11 countries with instant access to all footage, handled ingest of 64 live feeds from PyeongChang, used over 550 Terabytes of storage, and delivered over 50,000 clips to platforms across Europe.  Throughout the Olympics it handled over 20,000 file transfers totaling 127 terabytes.  Over 1,700,000 files were created on the platform and, using metadata, Mediabank created nearly 30,000 auto-clips.  This was all managed in a simple, easily accessible web-based tool that is exceptionally user-friendly. the full platform was rigorously tested for months, but the real test could not take place until the event went live the night of the Olympic Opening Ceremonies, February 9th 2018. Additional tension was added as both North Korea and Russia entered the Olympic event just before the Games began, making a last-minute hustle for the NEP and Discovery teams necessary, uploading correct metadata and checking the systems once more.  NEP and Discovery teams lined the operations rooms  in Oslo and Paris when the “switch” was turned on.  The system worked perfectly, and after a couple of days they could only confirm the framework for the new MAM platform for the next Olympic game was more or less in place.