How Iconik and IMT helped the Philadelphia 76ers and New Jersey Devils cut storage management costs by 34%

Managing media assets for an elite sports organization isn’t just about storing video files—it’s about making content instantly accessible for storytelling, sponsorship, marketing, and fan engagement. When the Philadelphia 76ers and New Jersey Devils needed a better way to manage and distribute their ever-growing media library, they turned to Integrated Media Technologies (IMT) and Iconik.

IMT provided the expertise to design and implement a centralized, hybrid-cloud media management solution built around hybrid storage and Iconik, enabling powerful access, collaboration, and efficiency. The results were staggering:

The Philadelphia 76ers and New Jersey Devils fans are some of the most passionate fans in the world. The Wells Fargo Center, home of the 76ers, and Prudential Center, home of the New Jersey Devils, host over 400 events annually, including NBA and NHL games, concerts, and more. Both teams’ media operations go beyond game footage—it includes behind-the-scenes content, locker room moments, and community outreach initiatives.

Before working with IMT, the Philadelphia 76ers and New Jersey Devils media operations were siloed:

“There was no centralized access,” Flanagan explains. “Collaboration across properties was essentially non-existent.”

The 76ers and Devils organization turned to IMT, an official technology vendor of HBSE, for a solution that could unify its media operations. With 16 years of expertise integrating video into data stacks and helping companies to drive value from their technology, they were the ideal partner.

“We reached out to IMT because of their track record,” Flanagan says. “Their professionalism and experience implementing systems for major sports teams helped them stand out among other companies.

MT took a consultative approach, working closely with the teams’ leadership to design a customized solution.

“The system we presented had to be tailored to support multiple sports teams, as well as subsets of verticals within those properties,” says Roy Burns, SVP of Media Solutions at IMT. “For example, on both the Devils and the 76ers side, they have a content team and a game presentation team, both with very different needs. They also have freelancers who need access to these systems to do the work they need to do. We needed to ensure the system was tailored to their workflows and made asset access easy. It was all about finding pain points and then collaborating with Harris Blitzer executive leadership to audit the media supply chain to find the best solution.”

They ended up developing a customized hybrid media management system that was nimble enough to get coverage out quickly, but secure enough to handle the complexity and scale of the organization’s growing asset library. 

Key components of IMT’s hybrid-cloud media platform solution included:

The system eliminated local storage bottlenecks and centralized media access, finally allowing the 76ers and Devils content teams to collaborate in real-time.

For Sasha Puric, CTO of HBSE, the success of this project wasn’t just about technology—it was about trust.

“This wasn’t a cookie-cutter solution,” Puric explains. “I’ve known IMT for years, and they are one of the few companies that truly understand sports and entertainment workflows. The biggest value IMT brought? They didn’t just sell us a product. They built a relationship. We trusted them to design a system that fit our unique needs, rather than just plugging in an off-the-shelf solution.”

With IMT’s solution in place, the Philadelphia 76ers and New Jersey Devils content teams gained a whole new level of efficiency.

“Iconik has become such a staple in everybody’s day-to-day at Harris Blitzer on the content side. I couldn’t imagine operating without it,” says Flanagan. “I had someone say to me a couple of years ago that if you can’t find something, it might as well not exist. We haven’t had that problem with Iconik.”

One of Iconik’s biggest advantages proved to be its searchability and metadata capabilities.

“When we were ramping up to migrate everything over to Iconik, we didn’t have any metadata in our on-prem servers—it was all filename-based,” Flanagan explains. “Now, metadata tagging is baked into our workflows, making content instantly retrievable.”

Another feature that stood out was Iconik’s AI speech-to-text feature, which automatically transcribes video and audio assets. 

“When we’re looking for something specific from a press conference, like an NBA or NHL media day, we can find it easily by searching the transcriptions we have in Iconik.”

Mirroring folder structures from the 76ers on-premise NAS Storage in the Iconik’s cloud-based UI has also proven highly beneficial. “If someone is searching and is familiar with the folder structure on our NAS, they can go into Iconik and look at the same folder structure replicated by the ISG. It makes it so much easier to find what’s needed from games, media days, or anything else.

For both teams, media touches every corner of the business—from marketing and sponsorship to social media and player relations. “So much of our content team’s workflows happen on the road,” explains Flanagan. “There are people traveling for games, practices, All-Star games, whatever it may be. Freelancers are a big part of the workflow, too, as well as media partners, sponsors, and players. We’re distributing to players, different media outlets, and more, whether that’s game footage, a recap, b-roll, community events, and more. So, having the flexibility of hybrid cloud and giving everybody access to what they need, when they need it, was hugely important to us as we were going into this.”

In the pre-Iconik days, distributing content was a time-consuming challenge, as Flanagan recalls. “We’d ingest footage, manually cut it in Premiere, download it back to the server, and then upload it to Dropbox. It was laborious. Now, with Iconik’s distribution capabilities, that workflow has been cut in half—if not more.” 

IMT’s hybrid-cloud architecture also addressed critical security issues. “Part of our consulting effort was about those unsexier bits of how you do the work in progress,” says Burns. “So not just how you search and find the content, but making sure that that content remains protected, archived, and cost-efficient.” 

Iconik’s access controls played a big part in ensuring only the right people had access to the content they were supposed to see.

“With two teams in different cities, we needed strict permissions and access control lists,” says Flanagan. “IMT ensures that only the right people have access to the right content.”

The other issue Iconik and IMT helped to solve was that of backing content up, so if anything were to be lost, the team would know where to go to find it.

“One of our big concerns was that a lot of content on our local NAS servers wasn’t backed up,” says Flanagan. “If that went, we’d never be able to get it back. Working with IMT, we were able to get everything under our NAS. And we have CloudSoda for archiving capabilities. CloudSoda was really important to migrate content back and forth between our different storage solutions. It’s particularly helpful on the backend to migrate older content that we don’t see a specific need for—the kind of content that’s not necessary to have on hot or warm storage. Being able to identify that, and keep things clean, has been invaluable.

With their new media management system in place, the 76ers and Devils are now positioned for future growth.

“What I found when I started was that no single group truly owned the content—it was a collaborative effort, but teams were largely working in silos,” says Flanagan. “Since implementing Iconik with IMT’s help, that’s completely changed. Collaboration has improved across the board.

“After all, media and content creation are the backbone of storytelling in this organization—it touches every corner of the business to deliver the best possible brand experience for our fans, he continues. “With Iconik, we’ve been able to produce content faster, access assets more easily, and tell better stories. It’s saved countless hours in finding, distributing, and managing content—time that we can now spend on actually creating and delivering great content. Just getting everyone educated on this platform has transformed productivity—and in turn, that saves cost.”

This is just the beginning.

IMT remains a trusted partner, continuing to refine and optimize workflows as the 76ers’ and Devils’ media demands evolve.

“We’re not just here to implement and walk away,” says Burns. “With our MSP services, both teams have a safety net—whether it’s new integrations, evolving workflows, or onboarding new teams, we’ll be there.”

The result? A faster, more agile media operation ready to engage fans, empower teams, and deliver top-tier content for years to come.

With Iconik and IMT, the Philadelphia 76ers and New Jersey Devils achieved:

Your media is your business. Iconik organizes, stores, and manages access to your most valuable assets so that you can focus on growing your business. 

IMT helps organizations like the Philadelphia 76ers and New Jersey Devils streamline their workflows, improve collaboration, and unlock the full potential of Iconik. Whether you’re managing content across teams, optimizing storage, or future-proofing your media strategy, IMT can design a solution tailored to your needs. You can start a conversation with IMT at https://imtglobalinc.com/contact/

Try Iconik today to see how it can elevate your media operations.