One of the most respected names in UK sports broadcasting needed a step-change improvement in the way they were producing and packaging sports news content.

The client's Sports News operation has a core output of programming that is split across bulletins for various news programmes, spread across their main channels, 24 hour news channels, online and interactive services.

Their production operation was using mainly an Avid Newscutter-based environment for many years but by 2007 the hardware and software in place urgently needed updating. It had been decided that an Apple-based environment consisting of Final Cut Studio editing clients and centralised storage would replace the Avid environment. In addition to the need for a hardware and software upgrade there was a desire to be able to share more content across the Sport and News departments and where possible, remove some duplication of ingest that was taking place.

Mediasmiths assisted the client in the following way:

• We created the overall system design specifying the links between the different geographically linked areas as well as the system integration points between the editing, ingest and playout areas
• We helped the client assess innovative technologies for ingest management and integration to complement the chosen Final Cut Studio solution
• We helped the client to map out the planned future workflows, and understand the operational impact of the changes against their current workflows
• We specified the roles and responsibilities, and specifically how they would change, under the new system
• We produced a server and storage specification that the client could procure against
• We produced storage management guidelines
• We produced a risk management plan for the implementation

The client carried out the system implementation against our specification on time and on budget.