About base
Since 2015, base has specialized in Cloud Native Media Services, to securely manage content at scale, and reimagine workflows in the cloud for digital media professionals. Our offerings include cloud storage, media asset management (MAM), media workflow integrations, and digital transformation projects. We guide customers through the journey of consolidating globally distributed media assets and data, which may be stored across multiple locations and devices, including legacy tape formats, hard drives, on-premises hardware, or even low-performance shared online storage such as Google Drive, Dropbox or Box.com, migrating them to cutting-edge cloud infrastructure.
Our team of experts helps customers migrate vast asset libraries to secure cloud storage, indexing the files with metadata, and designing tailored media workflows to include integrations with third-party software applications.
Each base cloud solution comes with high-quality support and technical account management, strengthened by ISO27001 certified security practices at every layer. This comprehensive service is all wrapped up with our professional services and managed services under our one-provider model.
Cloud migration pain points for large businesses
Large businesses often encounter significant challenges when migrating to the cloud and managing vast quantities of media assets and data at scale. One of the challenges that companies face is the scattered nature of storage across various hardware devices and legacy formats. This decentralized, disconnected approach makes it increasingly difficult for users to find what they need, especially as the number of assets grows over time. Searching through these assets to locate a small clip can be very time-consuming. Data sovereignty, security and compliance can become near-impossible to manage and de-risk. Hardware storage also has scaling limitations and requires significant capital expenditure, in-house hosting and wrap around operating costs, which also requires refreshing and support on a long-term basis. Many of these costs can be buried deep in IT budgets and are very hard to attribute against income streams. It’s a never-ending road to nowhere for senior decision makers, as they struggle to get a handle on their data, and their real-world costs.
By implementing low cost, scalable cloud storage alongside a comprehensive media asset management system, and integrated workflow solution, businesses can benefit from transparent and accurate costs reporting, flexibility to scale and collaborate globally, and a major up-tick in the security, reliability, and overall uptime of their infrastructure.
This modern approach to storage and software deployment also supercharges staff productivity by allowing assets to be discovered, worked on and shared more quickly, from anywhere at any time for end users.
The most significant pain point for large companies attempting to transition from hardware or shared online storage to the cloud is arguably the lack of time, people resources and in-house specialist program management, cloud engineering and software engineering expertise required for success. Many organizations do not have a dedicated team of experts or certified professionals to take care of cloud migration and development of cloud solutions. Their in-house teams are often extremely talented, but simply too busy with other business-critical and/or business-as-usual tasks, which means they do not have the bandwidth available to attribute their focus on such a transition effectively. As a result, companies often face a capacity challenge, stalling (or even failing) major projects.
This is where base can step in to make things happen.
Our Three Step Digital Transformation Process
No large business can move all its assets to the cloud overnight, as it is too large of a task. Over the last 10 years, we have learned that approaching digital transformation in an iterative manner is essential. That’s why we guide clients through our simple three-step process, which breaks down what can feel like a daunting journey into a much more manageable one:
Step 1: Migrate to the Cloud
We begin by meeting with a client to actively listen to their current business and financial goals, workflow challenges, desired outcomes, software tools they are currently using, and any other relevant information to understand how best we can help them achieve both their business and technology roadmap goals.
We then map the customer’s requirements against the right best-in-class cloud solutions, whether that involves cloud storage and managed cloud hosting, media asset management, or software integrations. As discussed above, a common theme we see is that many companies have their data scattered across multiple disparate locations, which are not suitable for cloud-native systems integration or for running large-scale media workloads in the cloud. Our professional services team are experts in helping and guiding clients through this first step of data migration, and then designing the most robust, and scalable long-term cloud solution to meet their ongoing business needs.
Step 2: Create your Content Hub
The next step is to build a media library or media asset management system, which we call a Content Hub, for our clients. The Content Hub serves as a centralized location where all digital media and other associated files (assets) can be indexed, processed, tagged, searched, managed, and made more readily accessible to authorized users around the world.
Our teams have deployed hundreds of Content Hub solutions for customers over the last decade, tailored to the needs of digital media professionals working across verticals including Creative Agencies, Brands, Media & Entertainment, Gaming, Sports, Education, Corporate Video and more.
A customer’s Content Hub becomes the source of truth and central repository for all of its media assets, in one secure cloud.
Step 3: Transform your Workflows
Now that the data is in the cloud and the Content Hub is connected, providing a ‘window to the content’, our software engineering team steps in to integrate specific base-approved tools and workflows, transforming processes to enhance usability for daily users. These integrations can range across project and task management workflow tooling, accelerating uploads and downloads, transcoding media into multiple formats, or incorporating AI tooling to enrich metadata and automate processes.
The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market for digital media is vast, with many hundreds of vendors fighting for buyers’ attention (and often providing very little cohesive value), making it difficult for clients to choose effectively, and rationally. We alleviate this headache by providing a curated selection of pre-approved, thoroughly tested, and scalable applications, complete with our top quality support and built-in security.
By focusing on the three steps above, we help our clients achieve a successful digital transformation tailored to their specific needs.
How base has helped large media enterprises migrate to the cloud at scale
We have helped a number of large enterprises across various industries migrate to the cloud, notably including Narrative Entertainment, LADbible Group plc, and one of the world’s biggest luxury brands.
Media and Entertainment Use Case
Narrative Entertainment contracted our services during the pandemic to migrate what was previously Sony Movies and Sony Kids Television (now known as GREAT!) into an entirely cloud-based studio, as part of their brand new company launch.
As a start-up without any legacy physical premises, hardware or software in place, Narrative had a uniquely blank sheet of paper and could choose the best, modern approach to its infrastructure.
As Sony was already running in AWS, our scope of work involved designing a replacement end-to-end solution in AWS at a fraction of the cost, and ensuring it could be fully deployed into production-ready state in less than 6-months, going live in November 2021. The project was such a great success, we are delighted to have recently extended our multi-year partnership as a key supply chain partner to the high-growth broadcaster.
We implemented tiered cloud storage, remote Adobe post-production workstations, media asset management, transcoding, automated quality control and automated end-point delivery of all their content – to multiple platforms. Files can be received from movie studios around the world, allowing for compliance edits, trailer edits, and the creation of all their marketing materials. The content can then be mastered, quality-checked, and delivered for viewers to enjoy on their platform of choice.
As a result, this was one of the first broadcast studio platforms globally, to be 100% cloud-based from end-to-end.
Social Media & Creative Agency Use Case
One of our clients in the online video, social media and creative agency space is LADbible Group plc.
We partnered with LADbible back in 2018 to perform their initial migration to the cloud, consolidating hard drives and legacy storage into one secure Content Hub. Since that time, LADbible has gone public in the UK as a high-growth listed business, and continued to scale their operations.
Their teams produce an enormous amount of social media content, creating and archiving many hundreds of Terabytes of data. They utilize our services for affordable tiered cloud storage, media asset management, archiving, and for our latest native integration with Adobe Frame.io. This particular base Integration allows users to seamlessly archive projects (with files and metadata) from Frame.io into base for long-term, low-cost archive retention. Over time, LADbible has discovered new use cases for our services and continually innovated with our expert team.
Luxury Brand Use Case
We have provided our services to one of the world’s largest luxury brands since 2021 and continue to scale up and support their global Content Hub and end-to-end cloud services, including a number of tailored integrations for project and task management, metadata management, view & review, transcoding, automated quality control, automated archiving and content delivery.
Before contracting base, the in-house advertising and creative leaders relied on third-party agencies to store, manage, and provide access to their data in a very manual way, meaning they had minimal control of their own assets and slow, frustrating processes for end users. Their main requirement was to regain data control and access, whilst reducing operating costs and speeding up workloads for storing, managing, and sharing files around the world with hundreds of users and partners.
base provided initial analysis and design, followed by full build, roll out and training of the global cloud platform, which is now used 24/7 by over 500 users worldwide.
Key Drivers of Enterprise Cloud Adoption and AI-Supercharged Transformation
One of the most significant trends over the past 18 months has been the rise of AI and the never-ending press coverage, investor hype-cycles and general board discussions about how AI will revolutionize business. Beneath the constant chat, there are some real-world, very exciting use cases which we are actively designing and deploying for our customers.
Once our customers have migrated to the cloud, and built their Content Hub, the path to AI enablement is heavily accelerated. By having the data centralized, organized and available to ‘connect’ to a plethora of AI tools and platforms, customers who adopt a Cloud Native Media Service are readying themselves for the future.
We focus on helping our customers maximize the potential of the best AI tools available and integrate them into their workflows in a practical way, which demonstrates real value to end users and real cost-savings to the financial decision makers.
Many of our customers who possess huge libraries of data are looking to monetize it by leveraging AI models, and enabling machine-driven metadata tagging so they are more searchable and sellable. The right strategically chosen AI tooling can be used to automatically tag and enrich content metadata, automatically clip it, generate new content from it, and even create new revenue streams from private model training, opening new ways for media content owners to save money and make money.
We are also witnessing creative agencies empowering their creative teams to use generative AI to create graphics, automatically edit clips, and generate different versions of materials for international distribution.
In each scenario we work on, our customers are looking for ways to save cost, speed up production and increase productivity, but always in a well-thought-out, compliant, and structured way.
As the digital media sector alone is estimated to have over 750 current AI vendors in the market (growing by the day), this area can be very daunting for customers as they try to navigate the noise and make the right procurement and integration decision for their business.
base has been actively designing and deploying AI-powered media services since 2018 and is investing in the expansion of our in-house capabilities, new partner integrations, and professional services offering to help supercharge our customers’ success.
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