Business

Wazee Digital Announces Tech Partnership with BASE Media Cloud (MESA)

Wazee Digital today announced a technical partnership with BASE Media Cloud, a U.K. company that offers a suite of ready-made cloud services for media companies. Wazee Digital Media Hub now integrates with the BASE Media Cloud ecosystem, creating a hybrid media solution that gives the two companies’ joint users the best of both worlds — Amazon Web Services computing; sophisticated processing and licensing workflows; and a customer-branded, web-based access portal through Digital Media Hub, paired with cost-effective, regionalized virtual-private-cloud storage, delivery, and postproduction services through BASE Media Cloud. The solution is intended for media owners and rights holders in any industry that regularly distribute large amounts of content and are looking for a more affordable means of delivery.

“Our customers are always looking to be able to interface to other solutions to expand their workflows in the cloud. BASE Media Cloud made for a good partner because, like Wazee Digital, its founding team has a long history in high-end sports production and postproduction, having worked across everything from Royal Ascot and Red Bull Air Race to Formula One over the years,” said Mike Arthur, Wazee Digital’s vice president of sports and live events. “This new collaboration brings together our collective knowledge and experience within the live events and broadcast distribution market to create something we know all our customers are looking for: easy-to-use, cost-effective content distribution. Even better, our joint design allows flexible, modular services to be added in the future.”

Digital Media Hub is a powerful, centralized, web-based solution that allows video content to be captured and made immediately available for global publishing. Through Digital Media Hub’s web-based user interface, customers can acquire, enhance, and distribute media gleaned from production, postproduction, and even live-event environments. Digital Media Hub is powered by Wazee Digital Core, the company’s enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) asset management platform built specifically for the cloud, through which users can search, manage, and monetize digital content in the cloud. Content is captured and ingested directly into Core in near-real time, and once the content enters Core, users can begin working with it in Digital Media Hub immediately and/or publish it to different endpoints, such as YouTube and Facebook.

“A growing number of our customers are operating in rights ownership and broadcast distribution. We see a great fit between Wazee Digital and BASE Media Cloud to provide branded, self-service portals for these companies, enabling them to deliver, sell, and monetize their content without an intermediary facility or slow, clunky manual-distribution workflows,” said Ben Foakes, managing director, BASE Media Cloud. “By leveraging our managed cloud services, our customers are seeing huge cost savings compared with the more traditional, physical management of content. Wazee Digital’s heritage and reputation for high-quality media asset management, licensing, and distribution services make it an ideal SaaS partner for BASE Media Cloud as we continue to grow our services in live events and broadcast distribution.”

BASE Media Cloud provides a collection of cutting-edge cloud storage and media software tools — such as cloud storage, file transfer, transcoding, and BeBop cloud editing — which the company offers to meet the increasing challenges brought about by the rising volumes of media files being acquired, processed, and delivered throughout the media-production process.

The integration between the two platforms yields a completely cloud-native joint solution wherein Digital Media Hub interfaces with BASE Media Cloud’s local, virtual-private-cloud storage and cost-effective Aspera Files delivery mechanism. In the new workflow, media ingest, selection, processing, publishing, and (optionally) licensing take place through Digital Media Hub, but private-cloud storage, package metadata upload, and high-speed Aspera delivery take place through BASE Media Cloud. The result is that the two companies’ joint users will be able to deliver multiple terabytes of content around the world at reduced cost, all controlled via Digital Media Hub’s web interface.