BBC MOTION GALLERY

Background and Challenges

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BBC Motion Gallery represents one of the world’s great video and documentary archives. It is a huge asset to BBC’s business, but it was also proving to be one of their greatest challenges.

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1. The archive has been through many changes throughout its long history and access was only available offline using a heavy manual process, requiring deep knowledge of a wide range of systems, processes and formats.

2. The process to enable secure screening of BBC Archive content to documentary makers with their commercial partner Getty Images took many days, contrasting with the need to access archive footage within minutes, especially when dealing with breaking news stories.

3. The archive remains the domain of the public service broadcaster whose infrastructure did not allow for direct access and support.

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In response, Abacus partnered with VIDA Content OS to streamline their content management and distribution. The solution involved:

Creating a standardised and intuitive customer facing platform that would enable unprecedented access to BBC archive video where customers can now securely and intuitively search the entire digitized library, view, annotate, clip, share, and download previews, and then select and order content.

Developing and deploying an archive system that allows BBC Motion Gallery to surface archive programming to customers that would enhance their user experience and compress timelines in delivering material to customers – ultimately driving commercial success.

Integrating via API with their partner Getty Images and their CRM Salesforce, providing a secure mechanism to traffic source masters between BBC Television Archive and VIDA storage as well as transcription technology for deep searching within the library.

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RESULTS

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VIDA successfully delivered a unique solution that manages a wide range of tasks and works seamlessly with BBC Motion Gallery partner's CRM system. VIDA now automates a significant proportion of the BBC Motion Gallery workflow.

Motion Gallery has a digitised collection of almost 60,000 programme assets hosted by our partner, VIDA. Their platform first gave us the opportunity to curate these assets, proactively creating collections to showcase our content, focusing in on upcoming events and commissioning trends.

The recent launch of an enhanced VIDA has delivered a step change to Motion Gallery’s offline business. The ingest process now incorporates the generation of transcripts giving a richer vein of metadata for research.

However the big news story is that for the first time our clients can not only view our assets, they can clip them up and place master orders too. All of this is available 24/7. The client feedback has been very favourable and bodes well for future business.”

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Chris Hulse - Head of BBC Motion Gallery

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