TMD MAM for Sweden’s Modern Times Group

TMD has implemented a Mediaflex asset management system at the new London playout centre for Modern Times Group (MTG). The Swedish-based international broadcaster needed to replace a life-expired system and move to a new London location. The new facility is in the broadcast hub in Chiswick Park in West London and allows MTG to continue to operate its channels effectively for the Nordic free-to-air and Pay-TV markets.

MTG London serves the Nordic region with 10 free-to-air and 10 pay channels, each localised by country and by sub-regions for advertising. The playout centre supports audio in eight languages and a further 14 subtitle languages. In its existing operations much of this required manual intervention and asset management was spread across multiple databases and workflow systems.

The requirement for the new centre was a single asset management register, fully automated playout and the ability to design new workflows in-house. MTG carefully studied the market and determined that TMD Mediaflex was the product to meet its requirements, from migration of existing databases into a single coherent asset management system, all the way to its unrivalled power for workflow design and orchestration.

The TMD Mediaflex asset management platform interfaces directly with Pebble Beach Marina playout automation. This is a mirror of MTG’s other playout centre, in Riga, Latvia. As part of the London project, the Mediaflex system allows the broadcaster to ingest at either facility, and for one to act as a disaster recovery centre for the other.

Rachel Bernard, vice-president of broadcast operations for MTG, considers the flexibility to adapt and develop workflows in house as particularly important for the future. “We now have products that are easy to adapt in-house without a dependency upon our supplier – and better still with each new workflow that we create there is no new invoice!”

The TMD solution allows us to create our own workflows and determine our own destiny. We have ambitions to extend our services, so this was really important.”

Tony Taylor, CEO and Chairman of TMD, added “It is easy to overlook, but one of the big elements of this implementation was the data migration. Bringing together information from multiple databases, in multiple formats, into a common standard which provides the metadata needed for flexible modern workflows is a complex task which could end in disaster. MTG recognised our wealth of implementation expertise, and together we created a unified information resource which not only powers automated workflows in Chiswick but also allows seamless integration with MTG’s other site in Riga.”