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Sports Media Company Streamlining Cloud Storage with Shade and AWS
Company Situation
The company operates within the sports media production industry, specifically managing post-production workflows for football-related content. Their team handles a high volume of editorial and commercial video content, including audience-led and fan-based projects distributed primarily on digital platforms like YouTube. The company manages multiple content drives and archives across their UK operations, dealing with large volumes of raw footage and edited projects.
Existing Workflow
The team currently uses a “bring your own server” (BYOS) model with mounted network drives hosted on cloud storage (AWS buckets). Raw footage and projects are uploaded to a primary content drive where editors work collaboratively. Previously, they relied heavily on Dropbox to store completed projects, which led to significant storage consumption due to full project uploads including raw files and assets.
Issues with the Existing Workflow
High storage costs and inefficiencies caused by uploading entire projects including raw footage to Dropbox.
Lack of an effective and automated archiving process for managing large volumes of raw footage over time.
Manual, time-consuming processes for moving content between active storage and archive drives.
Need for clearer guidance on how to implement and automate content transfer workflows between drives to optimize storage and maintain accessibility.
How Shade Would Change Their Workflow
Shade enables seamless integration with the company’s existing BYOS cloud storage, providing a unified interface to access, search, and tag media assets without incurring additional storage fees. By leveraging Shade’s capability to mount active and archive drives, the company can streamline their workflow through:
- Automated scripted transfers (using tools like rclone combined with cron jobs) to regularly move content from primary drives to archive vaults, minimizing manual intervention.
- Ability to manually drag and drop content between drives within the Shade desktop app, optimizing large file transfers over native OS tools.
- Metadata tagging and search functionality to improve content discoverability across both active and archive storage.
- Maintaining full control over when and how content is deleted post-transfer, reducing risk of data loss.
Benefits
- Significant reduction in storage costs by avoiding duplicate uploads and optimizing archive usage.
- Increased operational efficiency through automation of archival workflows.
- Improved media asset management with metadata tagging and search capabilities.
- Greater flexibility and control over content lifecycle between active production and cold storage.
- Simplified user experience for editors and media managers with a single interface for multiple storage tiers.