Sinclair centralises ingest and processing of content across the enterprise using Telestream Cloud Services, and shares content via Kumulate content storage management to replace ftp.
Sinclair Broadcast Group has signed a new multiyear enterprise-wide agreement with Telestream, covering all existing products and services across Sinclair properties, combined with unlimited use of Telestream Cloud Services.
Sinclair is centralising the ingest and processing of commercials, syndicated programs, paid programs and promotions for all of their more than 600 channels. Part of the motivation for that change is to allow the group to de-duplicate not only workflows and media, but also much of the equipment they now use to process this content at more than 60 physical sites across the country.
Archival and Media Sharing Workflows
Sinclair is using the Telestream Vantage Media Processing Platform for cloud and on-premises media transformation and orchestration workflows with DIVA and Kumulate, which are content management products for archival and media sharing workflows. Centralisation has involved using Vantage and Vantage Cloud Port to centrally receive and process content for their entire group within Sinclair’s public cloud environment.
Most media companies like Sinclair own hardware that they need to keep using while moving new workflows and burst capacity to the cloud. Vantage Cloud Port was chosen because it can simultaneously process premises and cloud-based content in a single workflow, and users only pay for media processing results.
“We're using a cloud-native and dynamic services architecture to ingest, QA, prep, transcode and distribute content. By using Vantage in this way we have been moving away from station-based, on-premises systems built to handle peak demand. We can not only scale dynamically, but also consolidate and, if necessary, decommission on-prem hardware and services that were built using older monolithic architectures,” said Mike Kralec, SVP & CTO for Sinclair Broadcast Group. “Since January we have processed over a petabyte of content through Vantage, consisting of hundreds of thousands of files, saving both cost and time.”
De-duplication and News Sharing
A major workflow initiative has been to de-duplicate and centralise news content sharing between stations. Previously, when Sinclair stations would share news content with each other, they would have to use FTP to transfer files between stations.
Sinclair's Tennis Channel
Now, Kumulate content storage management, working with Sinclair’s newsroom computer system, creates a type of media feed that contains actual links to the associated media. This internal feed service, and Kumulate’s internal automated media processing, serves as a simplified way for thousands of Sinclair journalists to trade tightly linked scripts and video.
Mike said, “We’ve been able to share hundreds of news stories a day within the group using Kumulate. When we use a shared story on air, it increases both the quality of our newscasts and our efficiency. Smaller stations benefit from using consistent content produced by larger stations with more production resources, and that results in savings that stations can re-invest in deeper reporting of local stories.”
Telestream announced this agreement at the 2022 NAB Show in Las Vegas. www.telestream.net
