Sky switches to Adstream's digital workflow technology to help handle a growing colume of TV ads

As Europe’s largest broadcasting platform, supporting over 200 channels, Sky has demanding and ever-changing needs in its ad delivery processes. At present, Sky’s sales operation handles around 22,000 unique ads a year, selling air time and receiving commercial content at its Victoria office before passing it on to each channel’s broadcasting site, or to its own in Osterley.

The system it uses to traffic all these files is provided by Adstream. It replaces practices that, according to head of commercial operations and content Steve Hutchinson, had become antiquated and inefficient.

“Going back as far as five or six years, it was all tape-based. Commercials used to be delivered to me by the agencies on the back of a courier – two Betacams and a VHS for every commercial. Our libraries were absolutely massive and as we were growing it was a nightmare.”

Now, however, Sky is on the road to becoming a “tapeless broadcaster” in terms of its commercial content, with 95% of TV ads currently being delivered digitally via Adstream.

The benefits of a digital workflow, both to Sky and to the advertising agencies it deals with, are manifold. It both cuts cost and adds value, meaning that there is less time spent handling physical tapes and less space used to store them, and also that ads can be placed and run at much shorter notice.

“Where I had six people just chasing copy and dealing with our libraries and data input, I have basically cut that in half. That has been a tremendous saving for me,” says Hutchinson.

Furthermore, he adds: “We can make sales much later than we used to. Where before we had to shut down a Saturday on a Thursday afternoon, we can now leave it open until late Friday afternoon because that content can be moved around a lot quicker. Where we need replacement copy, it is pretty much in real time.”

As an indication of just how drastic the speed gains have been, Hutchinson says that the average transfer time of an ad from Sky’s sales office to the Osterley broadcast facility has gone from two and a half hours to under a minute.

Campaigns can also be more timely, he adds, for example if an advertiser such as B&Q or Homebase wishes to take advantage of some unseasonable warmth: “If we suddenly had a period where we had some great weather – God forbid – they could at very short notice knock a commercial out that talks about garden furniture that they have had stored away in warehouses for the past two years. They can get that on air very, very quickly, because the time it takes now to actually get content to us is a lot quicker.”

Another upshot is that there have been more ads made. “I have seen an increase in that because it is so much easier to move commercials around,” says Hutchinson. “Advertisers have increased the number of executions that they make, which is basically because the whole flow is an awful lot quicker and more simplistic.”

The Adstream system also supports Clearcast, which is the technology Sky uses for pre-transmission approvals. Clearcast is not only being used for the approval of TV ads, but also now video-on-demand (VoD). Sky has recently instituted changes to this process after the regulator, Ofcom, published new guidelines covering standards for 'TV-like' VoD services.

Hutchinson explains: “We have just come to completion on a project with Clearcast and Adstream, whereby the regulatory rules on video-on-demand have changed, so we have had to find a solution to find a solution and set up a workflow whereby we can regulate ourselves more stringently than we have.”

Moreover, the integration of Adstream and Clearcast for approvals in general is yet another boon for agencies, he argues: “For them it is a much, much more efficient system, and they can log in and track exactly where in the approval process their submissions are. Because they can now deliver those commercials digitally, and the approval exec at Clearcast can physically sit and watch it as opposed to looking at something in script form, the process has been speeded up.”

The improvements in the speed of file transfer and the amount of data that can be handled will continue to be crucial in future for a couple of reasons. Firstly, files will get larger as advertisers and their agencies take advantage of the new generation of high-definition televisions, undoubtedly shooting more ads in higher resolutions.

As well as this, Sky will eventually begin to employ targeted substituted advertising (TSA). This will allow set-top boxes to select different ads for different households automatically according to the customer profiles Sky has built from its subscription data. As such, a far greater number of ads will be required to fill the same amount of air time. Adstream will be expected to take on this extra volume.

“We believe it is already capable of doing that, but we will have workshops with Adstream once we have ironed out what we want to do, just to make sure they can cope with it,” Hutchinson says. He adds that the first phase of TSA, which will involve selecting ads according to the broadest segments of data, is on schedule for delivery at the end of 2011. He says that agencies are extremely excited by the opportunities that this will lead to, and the value that targeted advertising could represent.

The volume increase that Sky has seen in recent years, and will continue to see as its business plan evolves, would probably have required commensurate increases in the number of staff had the broadcaster not deployed its current digital workflow. But Hutchinson comments: “Even though the business – in terms of the number of channels and number of commercials we deal with – has grown quite significantly over the years, that hasn't meant that I have had to keep adding headcount at cost, because the solution that I have is scaleable.”

The next stage in Sky’s digital workflow strategy involves not only quantitative but also qualitative shifts – moves towards more kinds of content as well as simply more of it. The broadcaster is already starting to use Adstream for the transfer of internal promotions of Sky’s own programming, for example, and Hutchinson also expands on further applications.

“Where I see Adstream growing, now they have cracked commercial digital delivery, is moving on to long-form. So can we now deliver a half-hour programme, or teleshopping windows which are 15 minutes long, at HD quality in the way that we do commercials?”

He doesn’t see it ending here, also expecting feature-length films eventually to be delivered digitally. “Instead of these films being flown over and actually couriered to broadcasters – the actual physical tapes – is there any way we can look at of having a two-hour film in HD delivered digitally, with all the securities wrapped around it that a film distributor would want?”

These visions of the future represent ambitious next steps for a broadcaster that has already come a long way in a short time from shelves full of Betacams and VHSs. Yet Hutchinson clearly believes that the technology and the strategy at his disposal are primed to meet the requirements of the impending age of HD and on-demand.