SPEED Channel needs to provide video-on-demand content to fulfill mandatory affiliate agreements. To meet aggressive cost objectives, they needed a solution that would not require expensive craft-based workflows using editing-rooms and skilled personnel. To meet growing distribution demands from cable and mobile providers, they also needed a solution that could produce multiple file types, for delivery to mobile phones and other personal media players, from a single set of program assets.

Quicksilver Agility VOD Workstation

The QuickSilver Agility VOD Workstation is a fully configured VOD content production workstation. Developed by Anystream and SeaChange and designed for content providers looking to cost-effectively capitalize on exploding demand for VOD programming, it combines template based profiles and file based workflows to automate the production of on-demand CableLabs-compliant content. The QuickSilver Agility VOD system can be expanded with additional modules in order to support other types of service provider networks and to expand production capacity.

Effortless Workflow

-File-based, tapeless workflow
-Programmatic editing bypasses edit suite
-Simple, intuitive interface anyone can use
-Single workflow outputs cable VOD, mobile VOD assets

Speed Channel Accelerates VOD Content Production

SPEED Channel, now in its tenth season, is the nation's leading cable network dedicated to motor sports and the passion for everything automotive. From racing to restoration, motorcycles to movies, SPEED Channel delivers quality programming from the track to the garage. Available in more than 68 million homes in North America, SPEED Channel is among the fastest growing sports cable networks in the country.

SPEED Channel provides cable operators around the country with NASCAR-related content that can be delivered to consumers as video on-demand (VOD). While SPEED Channel does not have the rights to distribute actual races via VOD, they have massive amounts of related content that includes driver interviews, ancillary events, news recaps, “featurettes” on drivers and races and more, that they can repurpose for multiple markets in order to further monetize and maximize the value of this content.

"Video on-demand is a significant emerging market for the content we produce," said Todd Daly, vice president of production and broadcast operations support at SPEED Channel. "It gives us the ability to serve the needs of our consumers, and has a great deal of potential to drive future enhanced revenue.”

Racing Against the Clock

Despite early success with VOD, SPEED Channel was struggling with a bottleneck in their production and distribution system. Working with an outside production partner, and facing growing "quick turn" requirements from their cable partners, SPEED Channel was struggling to keep up with demand.

"If an event happened on one weekend, we had to mail a video tape to our service provider so that they could get it by the following Tuesday and have it ready to air by the following Sunday," said Daly. "This cycle just kept repeating, which meant that we were spending all our time meeting these commitments, and very little time pursuing other distribution agreements or developing new VOD material.”

SPEED Channel knew that to meet increased demand for VOD material, they needed to institute an all digital workflow to streamline production.

Automation Turbocharges Production

"We tested a range of solutions from different providers," said Daly. "We wanted to find a system that was intuitive and easy-to-use but also gave us the functionality we needed to generate VOD content quickly and efficiently. Ultimately, we chose Agility from Anystream." Anystream Agility is an enterprise-class production suite used by the world's largest media companies that enables them to maximize the value of their content by capturing it at the lowest possible cost and transforming it into on-demand, actionable content that can be immediately and profitably distributed in any format, to any device. Agility is an automated, mission-critical solution that tightly integrates with legacy production systems to extract video and enhance it with metadata for indexing, searching, deploying, advertising and distributing it through any system, to any device.

For media companies looking for solutions to streamline production of VOD content, Agility automates key workflow components involved in producing standards-based CableLabs-compliant VOD content. In addition, the systemís scalable output capacity makes it the first automated enterprise-grade VOD production solution on the market.

With the Quicksivler Agility Workstation, SPEED Channel can easily and efficiently create new programs from existing content without having to go back and forth to their editing suite. The system ingests multiple independent segments – including feature programming, promotions, ads, artwork and program descriptive detail - and creates consumer-ready content that integrates with the program guides and setup boxes of any cable system.

Unlike other VOD solutions, Agility also lets SPEED Channel simultaneously create Web and mobile versions from cable VOD programs — enabling them to serve virtually any new media platform automatically and efficiently. Agility takes in content from tape, file and live sources, programmatically assembles packages from existing clips, outputs CableLabs-compliant ADI packages and Windows Media and MPEG-4 versions and delivers the files to distribution servers. In addition, Agility offers the ease of operation that SPEED Channel requires: the system is so intuitive and to use that they have assigned their administrative assistant to run it.

"With Agility, we've realized significant time savings that enable our editors to work on higher value projects," said Daly. "It enables them to stay focused on creating more content and keeps them from getting mired in routine encoding chores."

"Agility lets us easily create new programs from existing material, letting us monetize assets in new ways and repackage existing segments for other distributors and platforms," said Daly. "It does this while minimizing our production costs, which is essential considering that there are no real revenue models for VOD yet, although the potential is huge."

• Hearst-Argyle Television
• Accuweather
• SPEED
• VRT
• ZDF
• RAI
• BT
• NFL Films
• SCRIPPS Networks
• CNN
• sky
• T-Online