Overview
Having a longstanding relationship with Telstra Enterprise, the AFL engaged Telstra Broadcast Services and Telstra Purple to help with their Tape-to-Cloud project. The objective was to digitise the on-premises videotapes and film and migrate them to the AWS cloud so that the archives can be searched and retrieved easily, on-demand.
Challenge
Aging tapes and growing video collection
"In response to evolving business needs and a digital transformation agenda, the AFL has embarked on digitizing its extensive and captivating sports video archive, encompassing footage dating back to the 1909 Grand Final. Traditionally stored on aging physical tapes and film canisters within temperature-controlled vaults, these treasures faced considerable risk due to their delicate nature and manual retrieval process.
The inefficiency of managing the archive and the looming threat of footage loss underscored the urgency of digitisation. The challenge of distributing and reproducing tape footage in various formats also hindered scalability for digital consumption.
With approximately 120GB of storage per match and a continuously expanding catalogue, the AFL's archival demands continue to escalate.
“Without digitisation of our archive, there was a potential risk to the AFL that the visual history of the game to be lost if the archive was exposed to any potential damage such as a fire or flood by being solely located at AFL House. Historical vision of our game is such a precious asset, one that celebrates our proud history and ultimately helps bring fans closer to the game,” Monica stated."
The AFL’s purpose is to progress the game so everyone can share in its heritage and possibilities, and there was a real risk to that the visual history of the game could be irretrievably lost
Monica Forlano
Head of Production AFL
Solution
Tape-to-cloud
With a longstanding partnership with Telstra Enterprise, the AFL enlisted the expertise of Telstra Broadcast Services and Telstra Purple for its Tape-to-Cloud project. The objective was clear: to digitise on-premises videotapes and film, migrating them to the AWS cloud for easy, on-demand access.
The approach
Tape Digitization & Cloud Storage
The project kicked off with the digitisation of tapes by DAMsmart, AFL's trusted audio-visual digitization partner. Once digitised, the tapes were securely transported, prepared for AV extraction, and saved as high-quality digital files.
Leveraging AWS Snowball, a petabyte-scale data transport service, approximately 500 TB of extracted digital video footage was uploaded and stored using Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service.
Telstra Purple took charge of configuring AWS data servers and data centres for AFL, ensuring seamless management of their digital video archive. Telstra Purple also implemented the Dalet Flex media asset management (MAM) platform, empowering AFL to meet its on-demand and multi-platform distribution requirements. Modern DevOps practices were meticulously followed to guarantee reliability and repeatability, including the use of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for resource provisioning and Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines for application code deployment.
The possibilities of content creation from our digitised archive gives us the opportunity to immerse fans in the untold stories and history of the game. An opportunity to relive unforgettable games, the big moments and rediscover the heroes from decades past.
Monica Forlano
Head of Production AFL
The impact
Digital Archive Solution, Enhancing Global Engagement
Telstra has been a strong partner of AFL for decades and has helped them to identify and implement appropriate technologies and solutions to meet their growing business demands—digitisation, migration, management, and future monetisation of their video archive is one such project.
This solution helps AFL to address the risk of losing their assets due to aging and physical damages to tapes, frees up infrastructure that was used as vaults for storing these tapes, and automates the content search and retrieval process.
With on-demand archive clip request workflow and metadata, AFL can reproduce and redistribute some of the best moments in the sport’s history for richer digital and social engagement. It also enables AFL to grow the sport by bringing the rich history of the game to a global audience.
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