Australia's Seven Network Installs Signiant for High-Speed and Secure Transfer of Digital Content with Affiliates and U.S. Distributors

January 11, 2012

Source: Signiant

Signiant Replaces Satellite Links and Other Inefficient Traditional Methods to Provide Highly Flexible Enterprise Platform for Digital Content Exchanges

Signiant has been adopted by Seven Network, Australia's most-watched television network. At Seven, Signiant has replaced file transfer methods to provide a unified platform for secure, high-speed exchanges of media files with affiliates, distributors and journalists.

"Signiant has transformed many of our business processes by enabling us to increase the volume of data being transferred, while significantly decreasing the amount of work involved in handling and processing digital material," said John Golin, server infrastructure manager at Seven Network. "Our upfront investment in the Signiant technology has been well worth the savings in labor and distribution costs, while providing greater flexibility and visibility into content processes across our entire business."

Prior to adopting Signiant, Seven relied on satellite links, digital video networks and FTP, as well as physical shipments of videotapes, to exchange digital content internally and with the network's regional affiliates and U.S. distributors. For distributing promos to affiliate channels, for instance, satellite links offered limited capacity and required time-consuming manual handling of the content and coordination on both the sending and receiving ends. When changes in Australian broadcasting regulations allowed increased flexibility in digital multichannel delivery, Seven needed to find a means to distribute up to three times more promo content to capital city stations as well as regional affiliates — driving the network to find a more economical and efficient solution.

Now, Signiant provides a network-wide content exchange platform that has replaced all of the previous transfer methods, addressing Seven's immediate need for increased capacity and also providing the scalability the network requires as the business grows into the future. Signiant enables fast, easy and secure replication of long-form program content around the network, and also provides a secure Web portal for news journalists and stringers at all locations to quickly upload the digital content they need.

Seven has deployed 23 Signiant agents to business partners and affiliates around the world, including its wholly owned stations and affiliates around Australia and its bureau in Los Angeles, as well as the Yahoo!7 Web portal. Based on Signiant's exclusive peering technology, these agents enable Seven to perform secure business-to-business exchanges of digital content for tasks such as promo distribution, replication of long-form and short-form program content between the network's Melbourne broadcast center and Sydney disaster recovery site, receiving news stories from the field, and pushing program content to the secure Web portal for journalists. In addition, Seven's Los Angeles bureau has established Signiant connections with several large U.S. distributors to enable high-speed digital program delivery.

"Seven's Signiant installation is a textbook example of the tremendous value that Signiant brings to large, multisite media organizations with complex content transfer requirements both internally and with external business partners," said David Nortier, Signiant's managing director, EMEA. "We look forward to working with Seven moving forward as it continues to expand the solution for digital newsgathering and grow its base of content exchange partners both domestically and internationally."

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