Aframe Streamlines Arsenal Video Production

The football club manages hours of footage daily via the cloud-based platform

Premier League football (soccer) club Arsenal has deployed the services of Aframe, the cloud video platform, to improve its video workflows and streamline processes. Arsenal Broadband produces and manages the vast majority of the club’s video in-house, on a daily basis creating hours of video footage comprising documentaries, interviews, and match-day coverage, amongst others.

The Arsenal Player portal, with 1.6 million subscribers, publishes a massive volume and a huge variety of content.

The content is published on Arsenal Player, an on-demand online video portal that has signed up more than 1.6 million fans. With large volumes and variety of content, Arsenal needed to find a solution that could help it easily and securely manage and share content, as well as work collaboratively in a timely fashion.

The video content plays a huge part in the club’s fan-engagement effort, providing additional content around the team and the game, which in turn helps drive reach and engagement. Video is also important to the club’s sponsors, partners, and licensees.

John Dollin, senior systems and operations manager, Arsenal Broadband, notes, “The engagement with our fans and sponsors is key to our overall business strategy, and Aframe has been instrumental when it comes to helping us achieve this.

“When we turned to Aframe,” he continues, “it wasn’t the first time we had tried a video-management platform. We had previously worked with various file-hosting and -transfer services, but these couldn’t cope with the amount of content we were creating or the complex functionality we required. However, with Aframe, all of the HD media is ingested directly from the camera in its native format and uploaded straight into a secure cloud storage facility through accelerated UDP file-transfer technology — saving time and courier charges. This was key for us when it came to the decision process as it enables the team to reliably upload and handle content on a daily basis from remote locations without any loss in quality.”

Arsenal also uses Aframe for logging, a procedure that was previously very lengthy. This process is now a lot more efficient, and everyone who needs to can access the video securely via the Aframe platform.

“The logging process involves a number of different people in various locations, so it is important that they can all access it easily,” says Dollin. “Aframe has really simplified the process: the editors can now download the metadata from the platform and load it in to Adobe Premiere within minutes. We can also share the content simply by sending a link, and our teams can watch the footage on any device, which is extremely convenient.

“Aframe is definitely a key part of our future video plans,” he continues. “It is also important for us that Aframe integrates with our MAM system, and this is something we are looking to implement in order to streamline the processes even further. In addition to this, the overall technical support we have received from the team at Aframe is also great; they have ultimately become part of our wider video-production family.”