Backlight helps turbocharge strategy and operations for The Goodwood Group

The production team at The Goodwood Group is leveraging two of Backlight’s cloud-native solutions – Clip Studio and iconik – for the media management and distribution of content gathered from numerous events hosted at the Goodwood Estate.

Perhaps best known for the Festival of Speed, The Goodwood Group of Companies is a 300-year-old British sporting estate that hosts horse racing, cricket, motorsport, golf, shooting and flying events year-round. The estate hosts a myriad of events, from nuptials in the historic Goodwood House to horseracing and the ever-charming celebration of all things canine, Goodwoof. The Goodwood Production Team is at the forefront of capturing and sharing these experiences with the world as they happen – and also managing, distributing and revitalising Goodwood’s extensive archive.

Goodwood integrated its first Backlight product into its workflow two years prior with Backlight Clip Studio, a cloud-native hyperdistribution solution formerly known as Wildmoka that is popular with sport broadcasters due to its live clipping and live production capabilities.

Most recently, Goodwood has adopted iconik, Backlight’s media management and collaboration solution to help manage and navigate its extensive content library that dates back three decades. Today, iconik serves as the central hub for teamwork at Goodwood, providing a shared space where the production and marketing teams can access the media they need to create compelling content that showcases the estate’s events in their best light.

“It’s a dynamic tool for us,” said Elliott Woodcock, lead video editor at The Goodwood Group. “We feed live event footage directly into Clip Studio. The real magic happens when we clip these live feeds. Instantly, we can format these clips into varying ratios, ready for social media destinations, infuse them with Goodwood’s unique branding (tailored for each event and campaign), and then distribute them across the various platforms we want to hit.

“Let’s say there’s a dramatic moment on the track featuring two classic cars in a close race. With Clip Studio, we can select the extract, apply the desired image ratio, choose where to focus for each format, and then decide where this content goes on the fly, be that social media, or directly into our media management solution, iconik, which allows for rapid media handling and distribution.”

Following a substantial internal effort, Goodwood Productions digitised and transferred its 30-year media collection from hard drives onto an Amazon S3 server. Iconik now indexes this extensive storage, presenting the comprehensive archive in a visible and accessible way. “Iconik is now integral to our workflow,” said Woodcock. “The impact of iconik on our media access, viewing and collaboration processes is already proving profound.”

With both Clip Studio and iconik, Goodwood is able to make strategic editorial decisions throughout live production, and benefits from the recent iconik x Clip Studio integration that has accelerated the team’s ability to manage, find, and share content, all via one unified workflow.

“Separately, iconik and Clip Studio are excellent, together they’re invaluable,” added Woodcock. “If the integration didn’t exist, we would need to do more work and hire a larger team here at Goodwood to get content to our social teams. Thankfully, with iconik and Clip Studio in our toolkit, we’re streamlining our content production and enabling rapid distribution. Our archive and clipped moments are no longer locked in hard drives; they’re all readily accessible and reusable in just a few clicks. We can revisit and repurpose content effortlessly, which is invaluable.”