In the past 18 months, Ultimate Fighting Championship has moved from shipping 90% of its material on tape to 95% being distributed digitally, using Aspera’s high-speed transfer software to power its file-based content delivery workflows. UFC claims to be the world’s leading promoter of mixed martial arts and the largest pay-per-view event provider in the world. Its programming is broadcast to 800 million TV households throughout 145 countries, in 28 different languages. It is also hosted on its own UFC.com, and delivered on every major mobile and gaming platform including iTunes, Hulu, Xbox, Amazon, Roku, and Sony PS3. Its small production staff is very mobile, covering more than 30 live events annually worldwide, and needed a reliable way of implementing digital transport technology that would overcome wide area network challenges to deliver video quickly to the production crew ahead of each event and distribute it internationally within hours of each event. “On any given week, we could be creating four or five post-produced shows along with promo video for upcoming fights,” explained Production Engineer, Mike Sandon. “Aspera is the back end of our digital asset management system, so even internally, between our LA and Las Vega offices, those guys move gigabytes of video back and forth all the time,” said Christy King, VP Digital Technology R&D. Its editors use the system internally, but so do its distribution people. “We distribute massive quantities of video every day,” to about 200 different clients, said King. Using Aspera means that its production teams can quickly pull existing content from venues all over the world for inclusion in live broadcasts. It also offers a lot of exclusive footage for online and mobile viewers, including fighters in training, event week activities such as workouts, weigh-ins and press conferences, and behind-the-scenes interviews. “We needed to push large volumes of high-quality content from locations that sometimes have poor connectivity,” said King. “There is simply no way we could have ever distributed this much content as broadly as we can today without the ability to deliver video as quickly as Aspera does.” Adept Mobile worked with UFC to build the video ingest, transcoding, and distribution platform that allows it to upload high-resolution video clips for transcoding into various mobile device formats before posting them on UFC’s website. David Fox
www.asperasoft.com
