FOOTAGE: We open with grainy, black-and-white footage of an AFL match. The Telstra and Telstra Purple logos are visible in the lower right corner of the screen. In the top right, a title - ‘Kicking cloud goals with the AFL” - is shown.
AUDIO: The noise of a crowd at an AFL match and a commentator’s excited statements are able to be heard in the background. A subtle dance music beat can be heard in the background.
SARAH WYSE, GENERAL MANAGER DIGITAL - AFL: At the AFL, we have a huge archive of 22,000 tapes that have been sat in an air conditioned room for many, many years. Outside of preserving the history of the game, the archive has really presented a fantastic opportunity to enable our vision of bringing fans closer to the game.
FOOTAGE: As Sarah speaks, we see some shots of the AFL’s archival room with large two-reel tape machines and rows upon rows of old tapes in order on a shelf.
SPENCER WILSON, OPERATIONS AND BROADCAST MANAGER - AFL: Well, obviously the AFL is the custodian of the history of the game but it’s really important for future generations to be able to view this. The digitisation of the AFL’s archive is a mammoth task.
FOOTAGE: Spencer looks through the reels of tapes in the AFL’s archival room, taking old boxes off a shelf and looking through the tapes inside.
SPENCER WILSON: So there were two challenges: one is that the tapes themselves are degrading, and the other is that the equipment to be able to retrieve the material from them is also becoming more difficult. In collaboration with Telstra, the methodology to be able to take once we’ve played the linear video tape or the film, was to send that digital information to an innovative high-grade storage device known as AWS Snowball.
FOOTAGE: A monochrome digital device screen showing the words ‘AWS Snowball’ is shown as Spencer sits at a computer workstation in an office.
SPENCER WILSON: That allows us to keep the material on large storage devices that then can be linked to the cloud. The AFL were really thankful for all the work that was done by the Telstra Purple team to be able to spin up servers in the cloud and enable the high-tech recording, so the Telstra Broadcast Services were involved in getting a high-speed data link from AFL House, and then obviously serve that all the way into the cloud for the future use and the future harvest of digital material.
FOOTAGE: More close-up shots of old AFL tapes, discs and paper files littering the busy archival room are shown, along with the screens of computers being used to digitise these files and store them in the cloud.
SARAH WYSE: Probably the biggest benefit of digitising the archive from our media perspective is purely access; to be able to access those video files in a really organised fashion at our fingertips is really the biggest opportunity for us. So Telstra’s involvement was really critical in this project and getting it off the ground.
FOOTAGE: We now see all the AFL’s different digital apps and services displayed on computers, phones and tablet devices as the archival footage can now be used in modern ways.
SARAH WYSE: We see the digital archive really powering some of the innovation in the future, especially around our video endeavours such as AFL On Demand. The archive digitisation from start to finish, to vendor management, to migration to storage - it’s a really complex project, but Telstra were really critical in being able to make that happen and supporting all of our teams from end to end.
FOOTAGE: We end the video with the Telstra logo displayed on a gradient blue background, with the Telstra Purple logo moving into view alongside it.
For many years, the AFL had been storing its video archive on physical tapes and film canisters locked in temperature-controlled vaults. The physical nature of the ageing, delicate and fragile tapes and films, and the manual content retrieval process was a significant risk to these national treasures.
There was a big problem with this:
With each match taking up around 120GB of storage (up to nine matches are played every week, creating over 1TB of data) plus additional non-match content, the AFL’s ever-expanding catalogue is an issue that grows bigger day by day.
Telstra Purple and Telstra Broadcast Services banded together with Telstra’s Strategic Collaboration Agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to take on the challenge.
The AFL engaged Telstra to digitise the video archive catalogue. The objective was to digitise the on-premises videotapes and film and migrate them to AWS so that the archives can be searched and retrieved easily, on-demand.
The first phase of the project began with digitising the tapes with DAMsmart, who specialise in audio-visual digitisation. The tapes were securely transported and prepared for AV extraction and saved as high-quality digital files.
Using AWS Snowball (a petabyte-scale data transport service), around 500 TB of extracted digital video footage was uploaded and stored using Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3).
Telstra Purple configured the AWS cloud services for AFL to manage their digital video archive. It also implemented a media asset management (MAM) platform, Dalet Flex, so that AFL could meet its on-demand and multi-platform distribution requirements.
Telstra Broadcast Services provided an end-to-end Platform-as-a-Service solution to the AFL, bringing together all aspects of the Digitisation, and the connectivity to support the MAM platform hosted on AWS.
This solution helps the AFL to address the risk of losing their assets due to ageing and physical damages to tapes, frees up infrastructure which 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, the AFL can reproduce and redistribute some of the best moments in the sport’s history for richer digital and social engagement. It also enables the AFL to grow the sport by bringing the rich history of the game to a global audience
