A Live Sports Production Company Retires FileZilla and Turns S3 and Box Into a “Soft MAM” With Files.com

A US live sports production company, part of a larger broadcast group, produces hundreds of live events a year for professional teams and collegiate conferences, delivered to national broadcast partners.

The company's product is broadcast video at its heaviest. A full game is a single file of tens of gigabytes, and it has to move: from a production truck to the edit bays, from the edit bays to master control, and out to the broadcast partners who put it on air. Where that media sits between those moves is a storage question, and the company, like most production operations, had answered it more than once. Bulk game media lived in S3 buckets. Collaborative work lived in Box.

A Full Game File and No One Place to Find It

Game delivery ran through FileZilla. Someone opened the desktop FTP client, pointed it at the right destination, and pushed the file up by hand: tens of gigabytes for a full game. All of it moved on a broadcast clock, for content headed to air.

Retrieval was the harder half. There was no single place where a truck, an editor, master control, or an outside partner could go to find a piece of media. Finding a game meant knowing whether it lived in S3 or in Box, and having access to whichever system that was.

The storage split was not a mistake waiting to be fixed. Game archives belong on object storage, and collaborative work belongs in a collaboration tool. The conventional answer to the fragmentation was a media asset management system, a MAM: migrate everything into one new system and move every workflow with it. So the manual workflow held on, until the business outgrew it. The company's roster of properties was expanding, with full games for several professional teams across multiple leagues and an incoming franchise, alongside the launch of a new regional sports network. A delivery process built on hand-run uploads does not stretch across several professional properties.

What the company needed was not new storage. It needed a “soft MAM”: a single layer in front of the storage it had, where everyone could browse whichever backend held the bytes. It needed access an outside partner could use with nothing to install, handling that started the moment a truck or an editor dropped a file, and the protocols its broadcast systems already spoke. The production company made Files.com that layer.

One Files.com Layer, With S3 and Box Behind It

The design is simple to state: Files.com is the presentation layer, and the bytes stay where they were.

Using Files.com Remote Server Mounts, the company attached its S3 buckets and Box as folders on one Files.com site. A mounted folder is a real-time window onto the remote storage: browse it and you are browsing the bucket, pull a file and it comes from wherever it lives. Nothing was migrated and nothing is stored twice. To the people using it, the fragmentation is gone. Underneath, S3 is still S3 and Box is still Box.

Everyone reaches that one tree in whatever way fits. Broadcast systems and master control pull over SFTP. Editors and producers work in the web interface, where in-browser preview lets them check an MP4 before pulling it down. Outside partners and non-technical senders use Files.com share links and inboxes: a page in a browser, no account, no client to install.

Movement is automated at the edges. Folder watches fire the moment an editor or a production truck drops media, so arrival starts the handling instead of an email announcing it.

Full Games for Every Property on One Path

With the Files.com layer in production, the company retired the FTP-client workflow and put every property it produces onto one delivery path.

• Game delivery is no longer a manual upload. A file dropped from a truck or an edit bay triggers its own downstream handling and is browsable to everyone who needs it the moment it lands.
• Delivery runs all the way into master control for a team network, so the layer that serves editors also feeds air. When that network launched, this path carried it.
• Outside broadcast partners retrieve media through scoped, governed access, without holding credentials to any backend and without knowing which one holds the file.
• New properties come onto the existing layer instead of getting a delivery workflow of their own. The incoming franchise is being added to the same tree the existing properties already run on.

The scale is substantial. The site carries tens of terabytes of storage and moves terabytes of media a month.

The MAM They Never Had to Buy

A media asset management system, whatever else it does, promises one thing production people feel every day: a single place where anyone can find, preview, and pull the media, wherever it is stored. The company got that from Files.com without the migration a MAM demands, because the layer went in front of the storage rather than in place of it.

Delivering a game used to require knowing which system held it and having a login for that system; now it requires one address. For any production operation with media spread across buckets and collaboration tools, the thing to unify is not the storage. It is the layer in front of it.