Helping Major Broadcaster Ingest and Organize Election Footage in Real-Time

“MASV’s solution was easy, it was fast, and it just worked. While MASV staff remained on standby during the night of the election just in case, not a single technical issue or problem came up.”

Solutions (via MASV)

Table des matières

• Company Overview
• The Challenge: Easy, Fast Election Footage Uploads From the Field
• The Solution: Region-Specific Upload Portals, Cloud Integrations, and Transfer Automations
• The Result: Smooth File Uploads From Remote Journalists During an Election

Company Overview

A leading multimedia and broadcast conglomerate and one of the largest Spanish-language television producers in the world, reaching dozens of countries with live broadcasts, newscasts, series, reality, variety and talent, entertainment, and sports shows, including national election coverage.

The company operates a handful of television networks and hundreds of local TV stations, along with an on-demand streaming service and its own digital platform.

Le défi :

Easy, Fast Election Footage Uploads From the Field

In spring 2024, the company was gearing up to cover the 2024 Mexican General Election across the country’s five electoral regions:

• Guadalajara: Baja California, Baja California Sur, Chihuahua, Durango, Jalisco, Nayarit, Sinaloa, Sonora.
• Monterrey: Aguascalientes, Coahuila, Guanajuato, Nuevo León, San Luis Potosí, Tamaulipas, Zacatecas.
• Xalapa: Campeche, Chiapas, Oaxaca, Quintana Roo, Tabasco, Veracruz, Yucatán.
• Mexico City: Mexico City, Guerrero, Hidalgo, Morelos, Puebla, Tlaxcala.
• Toluca: Colima, State of Mexico, Michoacán, Querétaro.

But receiving, organizing, and uploading footage received from hundreds of reporters operating across the country at the same time was a significant challenge.

Challenge #1: User-friendly, fast, and reliable uploads from the field

The company’s reporters and freelancers needed a fast, reliable, and non-technical method of relaying footage from field-to-studio for that evening’s newscast or other shows without dealing with technically challenging upload methods such as FTP.

This had to happen during the sometimes breathless moments of covering a national general election, meaning extremely tight deadlines and high transfer volumes in a short window.

💡 Conseil : MASV Multiconnect channel bonding combines internet sources—such as Ethernet and LTE, or 5G and Wi-FI—for greater speed and reliability, even in remote locations.

Challenge #2: Hands-free uploads to cloud storage

All footage needed to be ingested into the company’s Amazon S3 storage bucket for backup and archiving, without reporters or studio production staff wasting time manually uploading footage received from the field.

Uploading large batches of content to S3 is often a technically challenging process involving multipart upload using the AWS Command Line Interface. Using the AWS Management Console is less technical, but it has a hard upload limit of 160GB and can be prone to misconfigurations.

Challenge #3: Keeping election footage organized in real-time

The company’s stakeholders in the studio needed a simple way to keep election footage from across the country organized by region.

• The client needed to track and organize file deliveries in real-time from the field to cloud storage with as little manual intervention as possible.
• They also needed an easy way to preview and select the required clips for broadcast, often later that same day, without downloading and opening the full-resolution version of every clip.

This all had to happen in concert, during a short timeframe, with hundreds of incoming file packages being transferred from remote reporters across the country simultaneously.

La solution :

No-code cloud integrations, transfer automations, and region-specific upload portals

After discovering MASV through Place de marché AWS (MASV rides on Amazon CloudFront, an ultra-secure content delivery network with more than 100 global data centers), the company signed up for a one-year subscription that included 40TB in prepaid transfer credits.

Production staff immediately began setting up and configuring dozens of regional portals in preparation for the big night. MASV Portals can be set up, configured, and ready to start transferring files in just a couple of clicks.

The client took advantage of several MASV features in its election news coverage workflow, including:

User-friendly and free upload portals

Portails MASV are designed to be user friendly: If your reporter can send an email, they can upload large files using MASV Portals with no training or tutorials. The lack of required training was a huge draw for the company, which needed to deploy an upload tool to hundreds of reporters with a variety of technical backgrounds on tight deadlines.

💡 Conseil : Portails MASV are secure file request pages you can use to collect media assets from reporters or other third parties. You can request files via email or send a link. Portals can be automated, integrate with popular cloud storage platforms, are fully customizable, and your collaborators don’t need a MASV login to send files.

Portals use a simple drag-and-drop interface. Users can create an unlimited number of custom or instant MASV Portals for free, and every Portal’s look and feel can be customized with a user’s unique branding, logos, and colors.

MASV Portals also come with built-in custom metadata upload forms, which helped the company’s production staff enforce consistent file naming conventions, descriptions, and any other required file rules upon upload.

Cloud integrations and file transfer automations

The company’s election portals were integrated with their Amazon S3 cloud object storage bucket in just a couple of clicks (no coding required) well before the election. Using MASV as a secure file uploader to S3 can cut down on potentially damaging misconfigurations, since your collaborators don’t need direct access to storage. It also allows for large file uploads of up to 5TB at once.

Dossiers de montres for each portal were also preconfigured to enable automatic uploads from the Portal to S3.

💡 Conseil : A Dossier des montres is a folder on your computer that automatically triggers a preconfigured task—in this case, automatic upload to S3 storage.

Reporters in the field simply dropped their video files into the Watch Folder; the MASV Watch Folder then automatically uploaded the files to the company’s S3 bucket, with all content sorted by Portal used.

Hands-free file tracking and custom workflows via the MASV API

The company spun up several dozen MASV Portals covering various regions in Mexico, from Puebla, to Chiapas, to Veracruz, Yucatán, and Jalisco. Portals are free and just take a few seconds to create.

• Footage uploaded from a Portal was automatically associated with the correct region within the company’s S3 cloud storage.
• Because each region had its own unique Portal, this workflow kept content sorted by region from upload all the way to cloud storage.

To ensure real-time visibility among all stakeholders—even those without access to MASV or S3—the company integrated its MASV account with Slack, helping keep members of multiple teams on the same page by coordinating deliveries and ensuring timely notifications to important stakeholders.

The company then went one step further by using the API MASV to generate previews of each file once they had been uploaded to cloud storage, which could then be used by studio staff during production.

Le résultat :

Smooth Election Footage Uploads From Remote Journalists

MASV’s easy, non-technical upload process and superior file transfer performance and reliability made gathering election footage a remarkably smooth and stress-free process—on the file transfer front, at least.

• Reporters in the field across Mexico benefited from a simple drag-and-drop file transfer process that automatically uploaded content into the company’s Amazon S3 bucket.
• Studio staff benefited from not dealing with technical troubleshooting or by fielding how-to calls from reporters in the field.
• Because the company was able to quickly set up and configure a portal for every major region for free, all footage uploaded to storage was automatically organized by region without manual intervention—a huge time saver for studio staff assembling footage for broadcast.
• News clip previews on Slack helped studio staff quickly review and choose the right footage without downloading full clips—a huge advantage in a fast-paced, news-driven environment where seconds count.

MASV’s election footage upload solution was easy, it was fast, and it just worked. While MASV staff remained on standby during the night of the election just in case, not a single technical issue or problem came up. The client has opened a number of other MASV Portals for other use cases since then.

Want to replicate this success at your own organization? S'inscrire à MASV for free and learn how you can streamline your file transfer and management workflows. While you may not have an imminent general election to cover, we have no doubt you’ll be able to put us to good use.