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Blue Lucy

Case study

IP is everything

How BLAM supports Banijay Rights in protecting and monetising their intellectual property across global platforms

With a catalogue that spans more than 200,000 hours of stand-out programming, from Peaky Blinders and MasterChef to Big Brother and Black Mirror, Banijay Rights is one of the most influential content distributors in the world. As part of global content powerhouse Banijay Entertainment, the company manages rights and revenue across an intricate web of broadcasters, platforms, and formats.

As the distribution landscape expands, so does the challenge of protecting and monetising valuable intellectual property (IP). Banijay Rights turned to Blue Lucy’s BLAM platform to evolve its workflows from legacy systems to a scalable, integrated solution that streamlines delivery and supports IP protection at every step, even after the content has ‘left the building’ and been published to social media platforms.

The Challenge: Volume, Value, and Visibility

With growing demand for content to be published on an ever-increasing range of consumer platforms Banijay Rights needs to be able to react quickly to commercial opportunities and distribute content in multiple formats on social platforms, FAST channels and VOD services.

Banijay Rights had outgrown the company’s previous in-house system and with the range of formats and delivery platforms expanding rapidly, a new solution was urgently needed to handle both full episode and clip publication.

Enter BLAM: Fast, Automated, Integrated

Banijay Rights chose to utilise their BLAM platform, which was already managing their broadcast media supply chain, for social media platform publishing and content claiming.  BLAM now powers a substantial amount of Banijay Rights’ social media and VOD delivery, including high-volume workflows to Amazon Prime Video Direct. But its value lies in more than delivery speed, it’s also about data integrity, IP protection and revenue tracking.

“From the point of publishing, we’re automating and using internal IDs and structures so that when we get information back from platforms we know exactly what revenue should be allocated back to what title.” says Richard Clarke, Head of Content Operations at Banijay Rights.

This automation is possible because BLAM integrates directly with Banijay’s rights management platform, allowing custom IDs and metadata to flow from source systems through to publishing.

“You can’t get content onto YouTube without having the correct IDs from BLAM. It’s automated through the publishing workflows. You can’t get it wrong,” he confirms.

Claiming content before it hits the feed

Once content is live, BLAM continues to add value, supporting Banijay Rights’ extensive IP protection workflows with YouTube and Facebook’s content claiming tools.

“Once a title leaves the BLAM environment, it’s not forgotten,” states Clarke.

As a YouTube Studio trusted partner, Banijay Rights uses the Copyright Match Tool to track uploads of its content carried out by external parties. Identified content can either be removed from the platform if found unsuitable and painting a title in a bad light, or ownership claimed by Banijay Rights who will then receive any associated monetisation

Content claiming policies are highly specific, tailored to territories, rights agreements and titles, and set up by the team using BLAM’s dynamic workflows. “Our team is presented with a drop-down list of all the various policies within the BLAM UI.   Our team can, for example, upload 10 episodes of MasterChef Albania, along with the season’s specific copyright policy, so that everything is in place before the first episode airs.”

Most importantly, this happens fast. “Ideally before transmission,” says Clarke, “You want content claiming in place before anyone’s even got access to the content, so as soon as somebody uploads the first clip, we can assert our rights.”

Built for scale – and what’s next

As the business of distribution evolves, Banijay Rights is ready. With BLAM at the heart of its publishing and IP workflows, the company has streamlined operations and ensured future scalability, even as new platforms and formats continue to emerge.

“VOD distribution’s always on the rise. We already have integrations with Roku, Pluto, Hulu, Tubi and so on, and with BLAM we’re able to manipulate our metadata and deliver in the way that each platform wants.”

And with growing support for FAST, monetised social video and new delivery models, the Banijay Rights team is keeping one eye on the horizon and on the tools that will help get them there.

“We’ve already partnered with Samsung, Amazon, Amagi… that’s a huge selling point. Any business that has a load of content just wants to plug something in and start getting it out the door.”

Looking ahead, there’s even excitement around how Blue Lucy’s work with AI might enhance the offering: As Clarke says, “We’re excited to see what Blue Lucy does with AI.”

Quick View: BLAM at Banijay Rights

Company: Banijay Rights
Challenge: Content delivery and rights management of its catalogue
Solution: BLAM – Blue Lucy’s orchestration and integration platform
Impact:

  • Over 1,000 hours/month to Amazon Prime Video Direct
  • Around 500 hours per month delivered to Tubi
  • More than 5,000 unique clips and compilations (C&Cs) posted, and almost 10,000 reference files uploaded in the first 7 months of 2025 *
  • Fast, automated uploads to YouTube, Facebook and more
  • Metadata-driven royalty reconciliation
  • Proactive, policy-based IP protection
  • Minimal downtime, maximum scalability

*These stats capture Banijay Rights’ posting done via its London office alone. They exclude posting which takes place under its instruction from partners in local markets, as well posting across the wider Banijay Entertainment Group and partners.

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Press releases

Blue Lucy shows AI that fits the task at IBC 2025

At IBC 2025, Blue Lucy unveils flexible AI and analytics tools to tackle media workflow complexity, including multi-LLM integration, the launch of the ‘Insights’ analysis package, and the expansion of the role of its AI assistant Lucia.

LONDON, England –  July 21, 2025 – Blue Lucy, a leading provider of media management and workflow automation solutions, is bringing a new level of purpose and precision to the application of AI in media operations.   Blue Lucy’s BLAM orchestration platform now allows producers, distributors and content creators to directly integrate multiple Large Language Models (LLMs) into their media workflows.  This modular, mix-and-match approach marks a shift away from one-size-fits-all for AI and enables operators to select the most appropriate model for a given task. The approach also gives operators full control over performance, cost, and importantly data privacy.

At IBC (Stand 6.C29), Blue Lucy will also showcase Lucia, their native AI assistant, working in tandem with external models to streamline complex workflows and deliver real, no-nonsense operational value. In addition, it is launching Insights, a new analytics package that surfaces actionable data from across the media supply chain to support data-informed decision-making.

AI that fits the task

Visitors to the stand will see how BLAM gives operators the flexibility to deploy, test and evaluate multiple AI models, choosing the best fit based on business context, performance, security, and cost. Whether the priority is contextual metadata generation, compliance, shot summaries, promo generation or a combination of all these, operators can select the most appropriate model for the operational requirement, and chain those connectors together in a multi-step workflow which accesses different LLMs for different business capabilities. For example, a lightweight, cost-effective summariser model might be ideal for generating metadata across an archive of unknown content, while a more advanced model may be better suited to processing high-value, multi-rightsholder footage where precision matters. Thanks to Blue Lucy’s microservice-based workflow engine, operations can be configured to automatically branch to the most appropriate model at the appropriate point in the workflow, maximising both efficiency and quality.

“There is an interesting confluence in our industry: On the one hand the very real economic pressures particularly in production and distribution, and on the other a step change in the capability of emergent AI models to deliver genuine business value” said Julian Wright, CEO of Blue Lucy. “AI does provide the opportunity to reduce operational cost and enable new revenue streams for producers and rightsholders, but with so many discrete business needs there simply isn’t a one-size-fits-all model,” he confirmed.  “Our approach, as always, is about enabling operators to choose the most appropriate tools for their business application – in this case that means the specific AI models. We have developed a significant and broad range of new BLAM microservices for a gamut of common LLMs as well as a framework which allows operators who have developed their own proprietary models to seamlessly integrate these in BLAM workflows.  The new connectors – coupled with the existing microservice capabilities – enable media companies to define workflows that combine sophisticated orchestration rules and AI models to derive measurable business value.

It’s about making AI truly useful in real-world content operations. BLAM gives operators full control and visibility, enabling them to choose the right model for the right job, maintain data sovereignty, and scale AI adoption at their own pace. It’s AI on your terms, built into the operational fabric of your business.”

Insights

Also launching at IBC is Insights, a new feature available within BLAM that surfaces clear, actionable data from across the media supply chain. From content usage and workflow performance to operational bottlenecks, Insights gives teams the visibility they need to data-informed decisions. The feature enables users to measure efficiency, observe trends, and make decisions with confidence, all from within the existing BLAM interface. It turns operational data into a strategic asset, supporting continuous improvement across content operations.

“BLAM captures huge amounts of valuable data both from internal processes and from integrated systems.  We have been using this data for many years to provide advice to operators on overall workflow optimisation. Now, after an 18-month development project to create a data processing plug-in and a new user interface we are able to provide an unprecedented level of business insight,” said Julian Wright, CEO of Blue Lucy. “Insights surfaces operational data across the content supply chain to support management decision making.”

Visit https://www.bluelucy.com/ibc-2025/ to book a meeting with Blue Lucy on booth 6.C29 at the 2025 IBC Show.

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Events

IBC 2025

Join us at IBC this September and take control of your content. Discover how we’re bringing a new level of purpose and precision to the application of AI in media operations, and learn how our new ‘Insights’ analytics package surfaces actionable data from across your media supply chain, supporting data-informed decision making for your business. All this, plus demos from our experts of BLAM, our integration and media orchestration ‘content factory’, and BOLT the content hub which makes securing, showcasing and sharing your content effortless.

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Press releases

Blue Lucy Renews Multi-Year Partnership with Banijay Rights

LONDON, England –  June 4, 2025 – Blue Lucy, a leading provider of media management and workflow automation solutions, is pleased to announce the renewal of its long-standing relationship with Banijay Rights, the global distribution arm of content powerhouse Banijay Entertainment. The new four-year agreement extends a trusted partnership and reaffirms Blue Lucy’s pivotal role in supporting Banijay Rights’ daily operations across its expansive content portfolio.

Blue Lucy’s powerful BLAM platform – an integration and orchestration engine purpose-built for high throughput media workflows – has become core to Banijay Rights’ day-to-day operations. Deployed in a cloud-ground hybrid configuration, the platform manages both AWS S3 cloud, and on-prem Quantum storage, with workflows executed where the media is most cost-effectively accessed. Operationally the platform supports the management, adaptation, and delivery of content to partners and platforms across global markets, evolving continually to meet the growing complexity of rights management, localisation, compliance, and multi-format delivery.

Since the initial deployment, BLAM has scaled significantly in response to Banijay Rights’ expanding content catalogue but without an increase in compute resource requirement. The system has seen a nearly 300% increase in asset volume, growing from just over 250,000 assets on initial deployment to almost 1 million now under active management. Today, BLAM manages more than 550,000 hours of material for Banijay Rights, including 360,000 hours of finished video content.

“Banijay Rights is a world-class distribution organisation , and we’re incredibly proud to continue supporting their global operation,” said Julian Wright, CEO of Blue Lucy. “The numbers speak for themselves, and this renewal reflects the strong collaboration we’ve built over recent years, as well as the strength of our shared commitment to innovation and agility.  In the past 12 months alone, the system has handled 1.3 million workflow runs and over 13 million microservice executions. It truly is a platform which performs at scale for Banijay Rights.  Perhaps most tellingly, there were more than 2,500 workflow configuration changes made in just one year – proof of the agility, responsiveness, and operational flexibility our platform enables. BLAM truly is a vital performance engine for Banijay Rights, and we’re proud to play a part in getting their content to screens around the world.”

“In our business, operational excellence is paramount. Blue Lucy consistently provides the speed, precision, and agility required to support our constantly evolving distribution needs.” said Richard Clarke, Head of Content Operations, Banijay Rights. “Their technology underpins key aspects of our global operations, with a platform that adapts effectively to our evolving requirements. Their responsiveness and ability to tailor solutions have contributed to improved operational efficiencies and measurable improvement in distribution workflows. We look forward to building on this trusted partnership.”

About Banijay Rights

Leading global distributor, Banijay Rights, represents a world-class, multi-genre portfolio of 205,000 hours of standout programming. Handling the distribution for content powerhouse, Banijay Entertainment, the division specialises in the exploitation of premium scripted and non-scripted brands to broadcasters worldwide.

Representing quality, excellence and experience in the business of linear and non-linear television and ancillary activity across all platforms, Banijay Rights’ catalogue encompasses a host of top titles from Banijay’s 130+ in-house labels, and a number of third-party producers, spanning drama, comedy, entertainment, factual, reality, family, formats and theatrical.

Delivering high-quality IP, which was born locally and travels globally, the distributor offers the best stories told the best way. Its landmark brands include Survivor, Big Brother, MasterChef, Peaky Blinders, Rogue Heroes, Marie Antoinette, Grantchester, Deal or No Deal, Home and Away, Mr Bean and Black Mirror. Built on independence, creative freedom, entrepreneurialism and commercial acumen, Banijay Rights operates under the direction of Chief Executive Officer, Cathy Payne.

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Blog

What NAB told us about the future of media tech

This year’s NAB Show in Las Vegas marked a noticeable shift in the priorities of media and broadcast organisations. Gone are the days of chasing flashy, or “cool”, innovation for innovation’s sake. Instead, the conversations we had—and the interest in our solutions—made one thing clear: the industry is doubling down on practicality, efficiency, flexibility and value. As a technology partner, that message resonated with us. It validated our ongoing focus on delivering tools that don’t just push boundaries, but solve real-world challenges—scalably, securely, and cost-effectively. Here are the key themes that shaped our NAB 2025 experience:

Cost Control is Now a Strategic Priority

Across the board, operational cost reduction has become the top agenda item. Many vendors push a “transformation” agenda but from users we heard most “measurable RoI,” “efficiency,” and “time to value.”

Instead of massive technology overhauls, customers are prioritising targeted improvements with measurable outcomes. Our BLAM integration and orchestration platform is designed to support such an approach, streamlining operations without requiring wholesale change – BLAM stood out as a natural fit.

Hybrid Cloud/Ground Is the New Norm

The industry’s cloud conversation has matured. It’s no longer about choosing between on-prem or cloud—it’s about finding the right balance based on operational business need and cost. Organisations are increasingly adopting hybrid architectures that maintain critical workflows on-premises while using the cloud to when its more efficient or cost effective.

Our platform was designed to support hybrid deployment from the outset and enables seamless integration across systems, services, and territories. 80% of our deployments are cloud-ground hybrid and deliver cost effective control, flexibility and scale.

Integration Is Essential, Not Optional

With consumer platforms seeming to grow exponentially across OTT, FAST, and social manual workflows simply can’t keep up.

The benefit of automation is a given, but integration delivers more value through reduced friction, removing manual process, and providing end-to-end visibility. At scale operational efficiency is no longer a business benefit —it’s a survival requirement.

Unlocking the Value of Content Archives

Companies are looking to mine their legacy libraries for untapped value, especially in digital and on-demand markets.

Our tools that support fast discovery, repackaging, and delivery—through automation and easy to access tools.  Blue Lucy is helping customers monetise what they already have, without heavy lifting.

Fast Value, Real Accountability

Today’s buyers are sceptical of long, drawn-out transformation programs with vague promises and PowerPoint workflows. They want to see real value—fast.

At NAB, we heard over and over how important rapid deployment, measurable results, and continuous improvement have become. Our approach is that we are a long-term partner in outcomes and continuous service, not just a provider of products.

Empowering the Creator Economy Securely

With content creation becoming more decentralised—and the creator economy exploding—organisations need to give teams secure, flexible access to content.

Whether it’s internal creatives, freelancers, or partners, our platform ensures content is available wherever it’s needed, without compromising security or governance. That balance of ease of access and control is more critical than ever.

Looking Ahead…

NAB 2025 confirmed what we’ve been hearing in conversations all year: innovation still matters, but it must be grounded in usability, agility, and value.  Blue Lucy is continuously building technology that meets those demands—today and into the future.

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Case study

Cutting the cost of converting broadcast content for OTT delivery: Off the Fence’s unsung automation hero

In 2021 Off the Fence asked Blue Lucy to help them come up with a solution for converting their broadcast catalogue for OTT delivery without adding staff or requiring a significant investment in new technology.  The automated solution that Blue Lucy delivered allows the content company to save hundreds of man-hours and deliver on a scale they were never able to before – with almost no human intervention. And as the demand for VOD assets increases, it continues to prove its worth.

Off the Fence is a longstanding BLAM customer. The content company first worked with Blue Lucy to migrate their media management and fulfilment operation to an in-house model using BLAM in 2019. Since then, the OtF team has been iteratively working with Blue Lucy to automate delivery processes in a way that integrates their existing technology with cloud capabilities. In 2021 director of technical operations, Sukhan Bains faced a new challenge: while their huge cloud-based content library consisted almost entirely of broadcast masters, the demand for VOD and OTT content was growing.  For VOD deliveries the broadcast masters require editing into a specific structure, as Bains explains, “The biggest issue was cost of creation for these VOD / OTT assets. When you archive assets in the cloud every step you take – whether it’s download, upload etc – adds time and money to the equation.” 

A problem of scale

Initially, Bains’ team was able to keep on top of demand by manually creating the VOD and OTT deliverables from the broadcast masters. The source broadcast masters were restored from the library, downloaded and edited on site, before being rendered and uploaded back into AWS for BLAM to pick and manage the delivery.  But, in addition to the costly egress fees that this process involved, Off the Fence’s operations team quickly ran into capacity issues. As well as the time spent downloading, rendering and uploading media in its round trip to the cloud, editing the content was a time-consuming, albeit straightforward, task. Bains’ team had to manually seek within each programme and mark cut points to remove broadcast elements like colour bars, slates and ad breaks as well as select the appropriate audio tracks so that only the active programme would be delivered. They also faced technical constraints, “We’re quite a small organisation and internet bandwidth is valuable – we can’t just brick the network any time we want to upload assets,” says Bains. With few solutions available at the time, and none that met OtF’s cost and efficiency requirements, Bains asked Blue Lucy to collaborate with his team to automate the process in BLAM. 

Going from a manual workflow to managing by exception

Analysis of the material highlighted one crucial factor working to their advantage: all of OtF’s content has black and silent frames between the slate and the active programme, in the ad breaks and at the end of the programme – at all the points where cuts are needed to select only the active programme. So, the teams began by exploring ways to automatically detect and create cut points where black frames and silence happen at the same time. The solution they devised relied on refining the tuning parameters of BLAM’s existing technology integrations to create a black and silence detection microservice that works in combination with (and enriches) the existing QC data. When a new order for VOD content comes in through Off the Fence’s rights management system, BLAM triggers the relevant automated workorder.  First, the black and silence detection microservice detects where the cuts should be and creates an EDL for the proposed edits, then the EDL is automatically sent to Bains’ team for verification using a timeline view in the platform.  Once approved, the EDL is rendered using AWS MediaConvert before delivery. The BLAM platform manages the automatic scaling of the microservice instances to avoid bottlenecks during peak demand periods.  Bains describes it as a crazy improvement saying, “At the end of year Christmas rush we did around 1500 hours of deliveries through BLAM and a huge percentage of those were to VOD platforms.  We just shoved them through the workflow, with a few hands-on-deck to do the approvals, and all of a sudden, this single-transcode and single-thread workflow was now autoscaling so there was pretty much no limit to how many files we could handle at the same time.  I don’t think we’d have been able to deliver half as many assets without it.”

Ongoing benefits

The obvious (and possibly most important) benefit of automating the conversion of broadcast content for OTT and VOD delivery is scalability. Bains estimates that their throughput increased by five times from one month to the next – with almost no human intervention. But, almost four years later, their decision to continue to use a trusted automated workflow, rather than exploring newer AI-enabled options, is driven by multiple factors: as it’s entirely cloud-based, the workflow doesn’t result in any additional egress costs and uses standard off-the-shelf Blue Lucy microservices. Off the Fence convert their catalogue based on customer demand and can choose to save already edited assets or to delete the edited files to reduce storage costs, retaining the EDL for re-rendering should new orders come in.    

 “The implementation of this workflow has been a huge help for us in a struggling industry where we’re trying to pivot to benefit from new areas. Leveraging BLAM to do the heavy lifting has removed some of the biggest hurdles for our OTT workflow,’ says Bains.

Get in touch to find out how Blue Lucy can help you save time and money across your content supply chain.

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Press releases

Blue Lucy to focus on data-driven value at NAB

The Blue Lucy team will demonstrate how BLAM’s new report dashboard provides unparalleled insights into content supply chain operations at the 2025 NAB Show, April 5-9, in Las Vegas. Visitors to booth SL6106 will also be introduced to the tiered commercial model for Blue Lucy’s media portal, BOLT.

“Reducing operational costs is the biggest theme in content operations right now. While cost savings can be achieved through workflow optimisation, this needs to be informed by detailed and accurate data about the assets, their source location, the processes they’re undergoing and the cost of each step in the workflow,” says Blue Lucy CEO, Julian Wright.  “BLAM’s new modular dashboard displays operational information in an accessible and repeatable format so that our customers can make data-driven business decisions and quickly measure the impact of any changes.”  

Because BLAM integrates and directly orchestrates systems and services along the entire content supply chain, the report dashboard can be used to track utilisation and cost of every step in a workflow. Reports can be customised to a customer’s specific business interest with the scope being any process the platform manages. Examples of the insights that these reports can surface, and some of the decisions that this data can help inform, include:

  • The total cost to deliver an asset – to ensure pricing is appropriate.
  • Asset revenue – to inform decisions about appropriate workflows and technologies used for premium vs lower value content.
  • The time assets are actively being accessed for delivery – to manage storage tiering timing and reduce restore costs.
  • How frequently different versions of an asset are required – to aid decisions about saving derivatives or creating new versions based on demand.
  • The amount of time assets spend in queues at different points of an end-to-end process – to identify technology bottlenecks, human resource shortages or training requirements.
  • The time spent and cost of any manual handling – to inform future decisions on the value of automation.

The Blue Lucy team will also demonstrate the latest enhancements to their media portal, BOLT. Launched at IBC Show 2024, BOLT is designed to provide effortless access to content, allowing everyone from media executives to data wranglers to receive, review and share content without navigating complex UIs or waiting for tech ops teams to deliver material. BOLT is now available in three commercial versions so customers can select a toolset that is appropriate to their business need and budget.

  • BOLT Essential: the entry level media portal providing easy content ingest, search and share.
  • BOLT Advanced: with enhanced media management and access control including asset relations, versioning, and advanced permissions for user groups.
  • BOLT Pro: featuring advanced production tools to support collaborative workflows for larger teams.

Visit our NAB event page to book a meeting on booth SL6106.

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Events

NAB 2025

Join us at NAB this April and take the fast route to value. Discover how new functionality in BLAM, our end-to-end content supply chain platform, gives you vital insights across your operation and facilitates data-driven decisions for your business. We’ll also be introducing the BOLT media portal for the first time in the US, with 3 new tiers of functionality to make access to your content even more effortless.

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Blog

Saving money in the media supply chain

6 RULES TO LIVE BY

Arguably the top priority for media businesses in 2025 is to reduce operational costs. But that’s easier said than done when you’re faced with increasing content delivery demands for an ever-evolving consumer landscape. Based on our real-world experience working with international media organisations, we’ve put together six principles to help you save money across the content supply chain.

1. You can’t monetise what you can’t see.

There are vast libraries of unmanaged content running into the 10s of petabytes at a number of the big production labels – much of which isn’t even available as a browsable version. This media may as well not exist as you can’t monetise what you can’t see.  This is a common situation that’s increasing due to the significant M&A activity in the industry where multiple media catalogues have been combined from once separate production and distribution companies. But large volume content management is not an insurmountable problem. The first priority for any content owner or rights holder should be to bring everything under management so that you understand what content is in the library. Connect the MAM to the media, wherever it is, and have it register the material, generate a visible browse version, and hoover up as much metadata as you can find.  If there really is no data, a simple microservice program can automatically generate metadata based on the information contained in your filenames. You might be surprised by how far this will take you.

2. Nobody move anything, until you know what it is.

An end-to-end media supply chain is not synonymous with the cloud. Your media and the workflows involved in creating, managing and delivering content across various platforms and tools can be controlled and observable whether it’s in the cloud, on the ground (on-prem’) or any combination of the two. Bringing media under management doesn’t mean moving it to the cloud or anywhere else. Once you’ve registered the assets and made them visible  (see point 1 above) you can make an informed, value based, business decision as to where the most appropriate place is for them to be stored.  Too often we hear media execs talking about their cloud strategy rather than the business strategy and ‘the cloud’ as an outcome whereas it should be viewed as a component – albeit an extremely powerful component – of a business objective. 

3. Clean as you go.

Cloud services can deliver significant flexibility and efficiency. Equally, storing material in cloud storage has accessibility and security benefits.  But cloud storage is definitely not the least expensive option.  So, if you choose to migrate your content into the cloud, it’s worth getting your housekeeping done before you make the move.  First understand what you have, what condition it’s in, what the likely value is, and what rights you hold.  Other simple housekeeping tasks such as material deduplication or identifying minutes of colour black run out from a digitised tape, or camera pointing at ground rushes can also be carried out with the material in situ.  The 90’s broadcast engineers’ joke of operators inadvertently archiving hundreds of hours of colour bars isn’t quite so funny when you move from a $10/TB LTO to incrementally priced cloud storage.

For this reason, we tend to support a controlled migration of content and workflows to the cloud rather than the ‘forklift content and sort it out when it gets there’ approach.

4. You don’t need to shut down existing systems to modernise your operation.

Your ‘legacy’ systems can, and probably do, still deliver value. There’s no need to change your entire technology ecosystem just because you want to introduce new tools, streamline your workflows or take advantage of cloud scale. In a constantly developing technology landscape, the best approach is to integrate, not deprecate. Your MAM orchestration platform should integrate with both legacy and new technologies so that existing systems can continue to deliver value while new tools – such as AI applications – can be readily incorporated into workflows to support ever changing business needs.  At Blue Lucy we achieve this by using our BLAM microservice architecture to connect disparate systems and enable a controlled migration to modern workflows.

5. It doesn’t matter where the content is. No, really.

The actual location of your content should have no bearing on your ability to monetize it. Your MAM should provide easy and uniform access to all your assets, no matter where the ops’ team or the media is physically located.  On-prem and cloud storage should be viewed interchangeably rather than one being for operations, such as fulfilment, and the other for the “safety copy” because your MAM ‘knows’ where the material is and can be configured to use the most appropriate repository. And, if your operation is all cloud, then the need for a “safety copy” is moot as the cloud vendor can provide multi-copy resilient storage through simple configuration.  80% of Blue Lucy BLAM deployments are hybrid and use both cloud and ground storage.

6. Start small and work incrementally.                   

Big bang “Transformation” projects are dead, and good riddance.  Big projects cost big money, carry big risk and often end up in big disappointment (when they’re not quietly killed).  Even the successful ones take a long time to deliver value, and the true RoI rarely moves the needle on the CFO’s dashboard, certainly after the long-departed big consultancy company fees are included.

Instead, big projects can be delivered in small steps using modern service-based technology and open APIs.  That’s why we recommend focussing projects on end-to-end solutions for a thin, horizontal operational slice.  This approach proves the technology and the business case with minimal risk and delivers measurable value incrementally, building confidence with each slice and allowing a rapid change of direction if necessary. If your service provider or vendor can’t demonstrate value within 6 weeks of any project starting, you may want to reconsider working with them.

Interested in learning how Blue Lucy’s BLAM and BOLT platforms can help you save money in 2025?  Get in touch!

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Events

MIP LONDON

Heading to MIP LONDON this February? So are we! We’d love to meet you at London’s biggest content week. Get in touch to discover how Blue Lucy’s solutions help you manage your expanding content inventory, and deliver more content, faster. We look forward to catching up with you there!

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