Most media teams do not have a creative bottleneck. They have a throughput bottleneck: footage that has to be ingested by hand, versions that have to be exported one at a time, and an asset library that only one person can navigate. We build the infrastructure that removes those steps entirely.
Open tooling · Your cloud tenancy · Source code handed over
A mid-sized UK media team we audited last year was producing 180 finished assets a month with six people. Four of those six spent most of their week on work no human should be doing: renaming files, exporting the same edit at five ratios, uploading to four destinations and answering the question "where is the final version of that?"
None of it is difficult. All of it is expensive, repetitive and error-prone, and it scales linearly with output — which means every new channel you add costs another fraction of a person.
We replace those steps with infrastructure. Not a platform you rent from us, but a pipeline built in your own cloud account, using open tools, documented in your own repositories, that you could operate without us tomorrow.
Operations floor — Bristol
Every engagement is assembled from the same six components. Most clients start with two and add the rest over eighteen months as the volume justifies it.
Watch folders, camera card automation and API endpoints that accept media from anywhere and normalise it into a single predictable structure before a human sees it.
A queue-driven transcode farm producing every format, ratio and bitrate you publish in, from one source master, with no manual export step at all.
A searchable library with real metadata — not a shared drive with hopeful folder names. Anyone in the business can find the right file in seconds.
Automatic transcription, speaker labelling, shot detection and tagging applied at ingest, so search works on what is inside the file rather than its name.
Licence windows, talent releases, music clearances and territory restrictions tracked against every asset, with alerts before anything expires.
Tiered storage that moves cold material to cheap archive automatically and enforces your retention policy without anyone having to remember it.
Media arrives from cameras, phones, contributors or partner APIs. Nothing is renamed by hand.
Checksums verified, proxies built, naming schema applied, metadata written to the catalogue.
Transcription, shot detection and tagging run automatically. Editors search text, not filenames.
Editors work on proxies in the tools they already know. One master is approved.
Every format, ratio and destination generated and published from that single master, in minutes.
Grade suiteThe single fastest way to fail at this is to ask an experienced editor to change how they cut. Our pipelines sit either side of the edit, not inside it. Premiere, Resolve, Final Cut and Avid all work unchanged — the difference is that the media is already there, already labelled, and the exports happen without anyone pressing a button.
The same principle applies upstream. Producers keep their spreadsheets, journalists keep their CMS, and the marketing team keeps its scheduling tool. We integrate; we do not migrate.
Every engagement starts with a written architecture document. The table opposite is the default position — all of it is negotiable, none of it is proprietary, and your security team gets it before you sign anything.
We hold Cyber Essentials Plus certification, carry professional indemnity cover, and will complete your supplier security questionnaire without complaining about it.
| Component | Default |
|---|---|
| Cloud | Your AWS, Azure or GCP tenancy |
| Region | eu-west-2 (London) or eu-west-1 |
| Object storage | S3 or S3-compatible, versioned |
| Transcode | FFmpeg on autoscaling workers |
| Queueing | SQS / Service Bus / Pub-Sub |
| Catalogue | PostgreSQL + OpenSearch |
| Transcription | Self-hosted Whisper, en-GB tuned |
| IaC | Terraform, your repository |
| Monitoring | Prometheus + Grafana, or your stack |
| Encryption | At rest and in transit, your keys |
| Certification | Cyber Essentials Plus |
| Handover | Full source and runbooks, on request |
Delivery test benchA regional news operation was producing 60 packages a week across four platforms. Two staff were effectively full-time exporters. Rights information lived in a spreadsheet that had not been reconciled in eight months.
We deployed ingest, transcode and rights modules over nine weeks, in their own Azure tenancy, alongside the existing workflow rather than replacing it. Once the parallel run proved clean, the manual path was switched off.
2 FTE on exports · 47 min median publish · rights unreconciled · 4 destinations by hand
0 FTE on exports · 9 min median publish · rights alerting live · 11 destinations automated
Fixed fees, excluding VAT. Cloud costs are billed by your provider directly to you and are typically £400–£2,600 per month depending on volume.
£6,500 fixed
£11,400 / month
£26,000 / month
"They built it in our tenancy, in Terraform, in our repos. Six months in we could genuinely run it ourselves, which is exactly what they said would happen and not what we expected."
— Head of Technology, regional broadcaster"Our editors did not have to change a thing. That was the entire reason the project survived contact with the edit floor."
— Post Production Manager, production company, London"The pipeline review paid for itself before implementation started — it found £31,000 a year of storage we were paying for and not using."
— Finance Director, media group, ManchesterTell us roughly how much media you process and where it hurts. We will come back within one working day with an honest view on whether infrastructure would help you or whether you simply need one more editor.