The Miami HEAT is a hot NBA team in a fast-paced market, and they rely on their creative services group to deliver a wide range of critical in-game and between-game content to boost fan engagement and experience at every level. To future-proof the capability and productivity of their editors, animators, and photographers, the group needed to break free from a restrictive storage platform and asset management system. With guidance from leading systems integrator, Integrated Media Technologies (IMT), they have implemented an agile, end-to-end workflow based on Quantum StorNext, CatDV, and ActiveScale that delivers extraordinary performance, scalability, and non-stop access to support any content production challenge.
The Miami HEAT relies on their creative services group to deliver a wide range of critical in-game and between-game content to boost fan engagement and experience at every level. The content they produce fuels the in-arena show, with video displayed on the Kaseya Center’s enormous LED screens. Between games they create content for multiple digital distribution channels—including the team’s mobile app, their highly popular heat.com website, and multiple social media platforms.
To rapidly produce rich media and video content for all these destinations at once, the team needed a storage platform and asset management system that could support multiple applications and formats. Their existing storage environment and asset management system couldn’t keep up.
“Our existing storage platform had a very rigid workflow,” says Blake Engman, director of creative services for the HEAT. “But we had creative services, animation, and media production departments that were using content in very distinct ways.”
Maintaining multiple storage environments or asset management tools that added complexity was not an option as they would add complexity and limit flexibility. “We needed a single source of truth—one location for all our content,” says Engman. “At the same time, we had to support multiple broadcast teams, no matter how they wanted to use content.”
Performance was another top priority. “We have 60 creators, animators, and other content people who need high-throughput storage for their work,” says Engman. “We wanted a storage platform that could read and write two gigabytes per second for each one of them.”
IMPLEMENTING HIGH-PERFORMANCE STORAGE WITH IMT AND QUANTUM
The Miami HEAT turned to leading systems integrator IMT, with a proven record of working with sports teams and managing multiple vendors to deliver a complete workflow solution. The team at IMT helped them design and implement a flexible, workflow-agnostic solution to replace their rigid legacy system. “IMT has extensive experience working with professional sports organizations like the Miami HEAT, where end-to-end workflows for media asset management, high-performance storage, and deep archive solutions are essential,” says Jason Kranitz, President of IMT. “We started this engagement with IMT’s Advanced Consulting team reviewing the media supply chain needs of the HEAT. Quantum was the clear single vendor choice to meet the MAM and storage requirements in combination with IMT’s Professional Services & MSP.”
