Automating a Major News Organization’s Content Ingest With Out-Of-the-Box Tools

Customer Overview

A major U.S. national daily with more than 15,000 employees across the country, this prominent news organization is renowned for rigorous journalism, global reporting, and influential commentary. It publishes both print and digital editions, has earned numerous awards for investigative and international reporting, and regularly produces photo essays, video, and interactive graphics.

We spoke with the company’s senior multimedia engineer, who described himself and his team as workflow enablers for the entire company.

“We go in and assess how they do things, and recommend ways to improve,” he explains. “Sometimes the tools they use aren’t the best option, money-wise. Sometimes their tools don’t fit well in their workflow.”

The Challenge: Finding a User-Friendly Tool to Easily Automate Workflows

Before finding MASV the news organization had used several other file transfer tools, including Signiant. But the company was left consistently disappointed and frustrated with the out-of-the-box capabilities and lack of responsiveness to feature requests.

“We were looking for something a little more flexible and user-friendly,” the senior multimedia engineer explains. “A lot of these other solutions require you to have an engineer on hand, and MASV was just able to do a lot more in an easier way.”

Other challenges the news organization faced with competing MFT providers were significant:

• A lack of receptiveness to feature requests. “We never expect the company to take all our feedback and pop it into their product, but we are expecting at least some things to go into the product.”
• Zero out-of-the-box automations and integrations. “Either it wasn’t possible, or if it was possible, you needed to combine it with another solution.”
• Slow uploads, depending on geographic location. “We always want to get the fastest uploads, but that doesn’t work if you’re having everyone across the world send data to Virginia every time they’re uploading.”

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The Solution: An Out-of-the-Box, High-Performance Automated Workflow

The senior multimedia engineer says the company configured an automated content ingest workflow with MASV quickly and with hardly any friction.

After running a series of speed, workflow, and security tests, the organization implemented the following ingest workflow:

1. The company’s journalists now use browser-based MASV Portals to upload content with speed and relentless reliability from anywhere in the world.
2. Content is then automatically sent to either company’s on-prem Quantum storage area network (SAN) or the LucidLink storage collaboration platform.
3. Content is also occasionally automatically sent via MASV to the company’s Google Drive and Amazon S3 storage.
4. The company’s media asset manager, Mimir, then automatically pulls content from the Quantum storage cluster for production.

An easy-to-implement, easy-to-use system

MASV’s user-friendly drag-and-drop file transfer system made it simple to onboard journalists of varying technical backgrounds.

“It was really easy for us to create multiple MASV Portals and onboard different teams onto them,” he explains, adding that the company spins up a Portal per team and has 10 to 15 Portals always active.

Around 90 percent of the company’s journalists now upload content using MASV Portals, which are free to create and don’t require uploader logins. The organization uses a specific Portal per team to help keep ingested content organized without manual intervention.

“It’s definitely made things a lot easier: We don’t need to worry about creating accounts for everybody. There’s a lot less stress, and a lot less need for an engineer to be on call at all times.”

Ready-to-go cloud and on-prem integrations

MASV’s out-of-the-box automations and cloud/connected on-prem integrations were key to automating the media company’s content ingest workflow into LucidLink and its Quantum storage using MASV Agent in a Docker container.

For the customer, the ready availability of such integrations – after struggling against the current with other providers for years – was a welcome relief.

“In our mind, these automated workflows should be part of the product if you’re paying for it,” says the senior multimedia engineer. “And that is the case with MASV.”

Relentlessly reliable customer service and engineering teams

The company’s consistent frustration with a lack of responsiveness from other providers evaporated after working with MASV’s engineering team:

• The MASV team created a custom workflow that automatically generates a JSON sidecar file attached to each media clip.
• The sidecar files enable Mimir to recognize clips and automatically pull content from Quantum storage into the MAM.

While the Mimir workflow was custom developed for this client, it can be deployed for any MASV customer – anytime Mimir is identified as a MASV integration, sidecar files are generated upon download. 

Fast, web-based upload from practically anywhere

MASV Portals combined with the company’s global accelerated network of more than 400 servers and bandwidth utilization enables fast, reliable global file transfers of any size from virtually any location.

“One big differentiator is that MASV has these hubs all over – and because we’re a worldwide company, that made things a lot smoother. The global infrastructure has been a big help in terms of speed.”

The Result: ‘A Workhorse With Very Few Issues’

MASV has both simplified and energized the news organization’s content ingest and management workflow thanks to out-of-the-box automations, global speed and reliability, and its ease of setup and use.

“MASV is an absolute workhorse with very few issues. It does what it’s supposed to do with minimal interruption, which is key for any file transfer system,” explains the client. “MASV Portals enable our journalists to do things on their own, instead of needing technical help. Workflow wise, it’s also saved us time because of the automations we’ve been able to put in. So it has saved a lot of time.”

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