German Touring Car Championship proves Signiant workflow for wige
German media rights company wige MARKETING has selected Signiant’s Media Exchange software to accelerate the delivery of promotional video content for broadcast after a successful test during the German Touring Car Championship (DTM). “We were sold on Signiant,” says Thorsten Schroeder, Managing Director at wige MARKETING. “It worked perfectly and enabled our customers to download large video files at speeds that were close to real-time playout — and without any failures or dropped packets like you might expect with FTP. For a reasonable investment, we’re now able to offer our customers unprecedented speed and convenience in receiving our promotional content for playout.”
For every DTM race, wige MARKETING uses digital transfer to distribute news content and race highlights as well as full race footage to more than 20 major sports networks worldwide. Previously, the company relied on FTP to transfer finished work to its clients, a slow process that was further complicated by the large size (up to 20GB) of the HD files in wige MARKETING’s XDCAM-based production workflows. These files had to be encoded in order to be transported over FTP, and then decoded by customers before they could be ingested into editing systems.
With Media Exchange, wige MARKETING is able to move these large media assets in a highly secure and managed fashion using a 100GB Internet connection, and at speeds that are many times faster than FTP. Because files can be sent in their native XDCAM format without requiring encoding or decoding, they can be ingested directly into customers’ editing systems to save time and streamline playout workflows. Media Exchange has been used successfully for four DTM events to date, and the system will be extended for several upcoming European racing series as well as the celebrated ADAC Zurich 24h Race Nürburgring in Germany. In addition, wige MARKETING has established a Signiant link with its associate company, Lauterbach, to exchange video content in support of the production of promotional motorsports videos.
“wige MARKETING’s decision to adopt Signiant shows its commitment to offering the highest-quality services to its customers,” says Joachim Bause, Signiant’s General Manager for Central Europe. “Media Exchange offers a powerfully simple method of moving files in a fast, secure and managed fashion to meet the business requirements of media content providers — ranging from global distributors like wige MARKETING to regional post-production houses, major studios and broadcast networks.”