Cloudfirst Drives Broadcast Archive Modernization for Disney ABC’s National News Archives

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Disney ABC Television Stations Group owns and operates eight leading broadcast stations across top tier U.S. markets, delivering award winning local and national news to millions. Faced with growing operational complexity and aging legacy archive systems, the group embarked on a bold initiative to modernize their national archive infrastructure, without disrupting day to day broadcast operations.

  • Operational risk: Downtime or failure in the archive infrastructure could directly impact news production and on-air delivery
  • Vendor lock-in: Proprietary systems restricted flexibility and innovation, creating costly dependencies

The Solution

Cloudfirst partnered with Disney ABC to lead a comprehensive multi-phase digital archive transformation program, starting with a deep technical and business audit across all facilities. This initial engagement uncovered critical insights, asset metadata gaps, and architectural weaknesses, leading to a comprehensive plan for transformation.

DIVA and Dalet MAM Migration (10PB)

Legacy Archive Audit & Modelling

Performed detailed system and content inventory, cost modeling, and migration scenario planning across all eight stations. Delivered data-driven business cases that enabled executive stakeholders to make confident modernization decisions.

Cloud Migration via AMaaS

Cloudfirst’s Archive Migration as a Service (AMaaS) team executed a fully managed, parallel archive migration from legacy systems to Amazon S3 and Glacier Deep Archive, with zero disruption to live production. Over 10 million assets representing over 10PB of high-value assets were securely transitioned.

Metadata & MAM Modernization

Integrated AWS Media2Cloud services to automate metadata enrichment. Migrated and synchronized metadata between Dalet Galaxy 4 and Galaxy 5 environments using JSON sidecars, enabling cloud native ingest and centralized archive workflows.

Benefits

  • Decommissioned aging, high-maintenance tape archives
  • Redirected capital investment from legacy hardware to cloud scalability
  • Enabled Dalet MAM modernization and future-proofed workflows
  • Centralized, cloud-native access to national news archives for global teams
  • Improved content durability and disaster resilience through AWS
  • Delivered 24x7 proactive legacy system support – reducing support costs and improving SLAs
  • Zero-impact migration ensured uninterrupted broadcast operations

“Cloudfirst helped us truly comprehend our archive operations, empowering us to make data-driven decisions regarding the future of our digital archives. Based on their comprehensive analysis, we decided to migrate eight station archives—about 10PB of data—to AWS. Cloudfirst also took over 24x7 DIVA software support across all eight facilities, reducing our support costs and improving SLAs. They handled the entire end-to-end migration while supporting sustaining operations with zero staff impact.”
Client Executive, Disney ABC OTV Group

  • Centralized, cloud native access to national news archives for global teams
  • Delivered 24x7 proactive legacy system support reducing support costs and improving SLAs
  • Improved content durability and disaster resilience through AWS
  • Enabled Dalet MAM modernization and future-proofed workflows