Media Company Integrating Frame.io and Grass Valley Workflows

This company operates within the media and entertainment industry, with extensive experience spanning esports, traditional sports, and live event production. Their team manages multiple production business units, including a recently reactivated unit focused on boxing and sports content. They also run a proprietary streaming platform optimized for synchronized audio-video delivery and high-resolution formats like 8K. The company serves diverse markets, including esports IPs with international stakeholders, and is preparing to launch a news channel as part of their expanding content portfolio.

Currently, the company relies on a mix of legacy and modern systems, including proprietary streaming infrastructure and various Media Asset Management (MAM) tools such as Elements. They also utilize Frame.io and PCoE (workstations-based workflows) particularly through their partnership with Grass Valley. For esports content, they build custom streaming pipelines (e.g., for NetEase) and manage content acquisition and review across global teams with complex access control needs. Their storage and workflow ecosystem involves multiple disparate tools, on-prem servers, and cloud solutions.

The company faces several challenges with their current setup: - Scalability: Difficulty scaling MAM and production workflows up or down to meet varying project demands. - Fragmentation: Multiple tools and storage silos complicate asset tracking, review, and access control. - Access Control: Complex permissions are needed for international teams, including support for non-Latin characters (e.g., Chinese), which many legacy systems do not handle well. - Latency in asset availability: Current systems require assets to be fully ingested before workflows can proceed, limiting efficiency. - Integration Limitations: Existing toolsets lack seamless integration, causing workflow disruptions and version control issues.

Shade offers a unified platform that consolidates asset management, review, sharing, and archiving into a single pane of glass. This eliminates the need to juggle multiple disconnected tools and storage systems. Shade’s open API and SDK enable upstream and downstream integration with content creation and production tools, supporting automation and streamlined operations. The platform’s cloud-native architecture facilitates dynamic scaling of resources, matching the company’s fluctuating project requirements. Shade’s roadmap includes support for proxy workflows and enhanced character encoding, addressing the company’s specific needs around international collaboration and live production.