Case Study: Sky Group

This story originally appeared in the July/August 2020

Challenge
The Sky Group, Europe’s leading direct-to-
consumer media and entertainment company,
needed to move away from traditional media
asset management and workflow systems,
with their inherent constraints on efficiency,
agility, and scalability, and toward a cloud-based
solution for media processing. In doing so, the
group also sought to modernize and centralize
operations across Sky UK, Sky Italia, and Sky
Deutschland.
Kevin Hughes (left) and Steve Hale (right)
“Sky had reached the point where we could go
no further without some major changes within
our current supply chain,” says Darren Long,
Group Content Processing Director for Sky UK. “Our content and services are incredibly
“We were struggling to cope with the volume important to us and become increasingly
and complexities of our supply chain. It had valuable over time, so we needed to reinvest to
become such a manual task, requiring costly make sure that we had the right level of video
time and resources with every channel launch. quality and service availability, and that we
As we learned about the possibilities of cloud- were able to support new standards for new
based processing, we realized it could really products quickly” says Kevin Hughes, Director
supercharge dynamic processing of our content.” of Broadcast Engineering at Sky Deutschland.
“SDVI’s Rally platform offered a really good
It had become difficult to scale existing on- opportunity to build a system for our normal
premise systems while maintaining efficient content volumes which can also be immediately
resource utilization, particularly at Sky scaled for the big peaks we see when
Deutschland. Because these systems were older processing back catalogues or when we bring
and heavily integrated into other systems, even in new rights. And this can be done instantly
small changes took time and extensive testing, without investment. Ultimately, what’s really
drawing out time to market. For quick-to-market great about having an end Cloud based supply
propositions, Sky relied on manual processes chain is the benefits it brings to our customers.
performed by the content handling team. Over We can now rapidly deliver high quality content
time, these manual processes increased, growing and catalogue parity across all of our products
more onerous and more prone to error. from launch.”

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Solution
Sky has started to incorporate the SDVI Rally
cloud-based media supply chain platform across “As we learned about the possibilities of cloud-
its operations in the U.K. and Germany with based processing, we realised it could really
Italy following in a few months. Rally is a cloud- supercharge dynamic processing of our content.”
native platform that supports increased agility, – Darren Long
efficiency, and business growth, deploying
all the applications and infrastructure to
create a dynamic, responsive media supply
chain. These resources can be located on- Unlike a managed service, the Rally platform
premise, in a public cloud, in a private cloud, or allows Sky to build its own supply chains, control
in any combination. the workflow, and adapt quickly and efficiently,
without having to work through change orders.
In the UK, Sky uses Rally to enable a simple
transmission packaging workflow. Assets are “We know our data and our files better than
delivered into AWS S3, metadata is added, and anybody, and we know what goes wrong with
assets are transcoded and then delivered to them and where we have challenges, so it made
on-premise production systems, with BSS (Sky’s sense to build our own platform using the
in-house scheduling system) updated to ensure Rally toolset,” says Steve Hale, Head of Content
assets are available on appropriate systems. In Platform Development at Sky. “By leveraging
Italy, Rally is initially being used to underpin a Rally and backend AWS cloud services to fully
disaster recovery platform for a mix of long-and decouple tight integration between legacy
short-form content. systems, we gain flexibility without the need for
complex integrations or concern over potential
In Germany, Rally is built into Sky’s cloud issues downstream.”
processing (CP1) platform, taking finished
media and enriching it with metadata, as well as Implementing application services from multiple
orchestrating a number of tasks including QC, vendors, Sky enjoys greater agility in deploying
encoding, packaging, and securing that content the best-in-class tools required in the workflows.
for all 27 Sky Deutschland distribution points. The Sky has found it is now easier to work with both
platform supports delivery to Sky Go, Sky Store, new and existing vendors, uniting their preferred
and the web for consumption on various devices. applications on a single platform.
To this end, Sky has moved from a mix of manual
and automated processes to a fully automated “Building a cloud-native solution with the mature
workflow with supply chains completed much functionality of Rally would take a serious
more quickly and accurately without intervention. commitment of internal resources over a very
long period of time,” notes Hale. “If you want
to get up and running quickly across multiple
regions, as we did, then Rally is the ideal
platform.”

Result
Sky is making massive technical and operational
leaps in how it processes content. No longer
limited by the capacity of on-premise systems,
Sky can simply spin up in the cloud for highly
SDVI Rally User Interface adaptive and elastic content handling.

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 Over time, Sky’s Rally platform will provide
No longer limited by the capacity of on-premise a transparent view of costs for Sky UK, Sky
systems, the broadcaster can simply spin up Italia, and Sky Deutschland. Sky will be able to
in the cloud for highly adaptive and elastic compare differences and commonalities across
these sites and retool workflows based on
content handling.
that understanding. Knowing every part of the
process and what it costs, the media group can
Sky’s automated workflows increase efficiency map out a more economical way of working.
by enabling the processing of content in a near-
to-live model. As a result, Sky can stand up new “For me what’s most exciting is that we can
propositions and take them to market quickly, a understand our costs and the value we’re getting
critical capability in today’s marketplace. Sky can on the back end,” says Long. “I think there’s so
also now rapidly package media for additional much opportunity as
endpoints and platforms without a significant we move forward.
increase in resource. We’re only scratching
the surface at the
“In the past, working out price-per-minute moment. As our Rally
costs was very challenging,” says Hale. “To implementation gets
create internal business cases, we had to think deeper and more
about human resources, capital investment sophisticated, the
and depreciation over time, and utilization — a platform will open up
complex set of variables. Now we can do that very opportunities we’ve
accurately and very quickly to determine which Darren Long, Group Content not even thought
services and workflows are most viable for us.” Processing Director, Sky UK about yet.”

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