USC Digital Repository Selects Levels Beyond’s Reach Engine for Content Management and Distribution

The USC Digital Repository has selected Levels Beyond’s Reach Engine Studio platform to help simplify its content management and distribution from its cloud-based media archive. USC Digital Repository plans to use the Levels Beyond to provide streamlined media management, distribution, and monetization capabilities for video producers who host their material within the USC Digital Repository’s eight petabyte catalog of commercial and academic content spanning 50 years.

This arrangement will provide an opportunity for content owners to use the USC Digital Repository to digitize, preserve, and store a video library and then use web-based tools to manage, edit, package, and distribute to any content delivery network, website or individual, anywhere in the world.

“The explosion of commercial and academic digital content and the need for greater access is driving demand for highly efficient, integrated and accessible archiving solutions. Levels Beyond understands the management, preservation and distribution challenges our users face. Their Reach Engine Studio platform seamlessly provides customers with the flexibility and performance to cost-effectively package high-value content for worldwide distribution,” said Sam Gustman, executive director of the USC Digital Repository and associate dean of USC Libraries.

The USC Digital Repository was built from the experience and infrastructure created to house the USC Shoah Foundation’s video archives. It is among the first such repositories in the country to open its services to all commercial and educational users, providing professional expertise and technological resources to allow users to cost-effectively digitize, preserve and manage complex collections of film, TV, and video tape assets.

The USC Digital Repository arrangement with Levels Beyond will be of value to large public media collections and commercial studio archives as well as small scholarly and programming libraries that require cost-effective cloud-based storage, preservation, management, packaging and distribution of content on a global scale.

“USC Digital Repository is taking a strong step forward for all content owners, producers and consumers by making their expertise available to the scholastic and commercial video market.  Today’s libraries are dynamic living vehicles, not just resting places for static content. It’s critical to allow users easier upload, access, editing, distribution and integration across all video platforms.  This is a unique and powerful partnership,” said Art Raymond, CEO of Levels Beyond. “No media vendor comes close to the stability and functionality of this joint solution.”

The USC Libraries, administrative home of the USC Digital Repository, provide expertise in imaging services, physical preservation, and metadata. The USC Digital Repository, located at http://repository.usc.edu/ unites the expertise and resources of its three founding partners: the USC Libraries, the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, and USC’s Information Technology Services. The center brings expertise in mass-conversion media preservation and cataloging systems, as well as offers the infrastructure for digital preservation through the processing power of one of the nation’s most powerful academic supercomputers.

Archivists, production companies, filmmakers, TV producers, researchers, scientists, and distribution partners can use the Levels Beyond Reach Engine Studio’s web interface to easily find, retrieve, edit, archive, manage licenses, and distribute their content.

With Reach Engine, professionals can access any type of media from anywhere in the world, whether a raw or completed asset.  Compatible with all major digital content creation hardware and software, Reach Engine’s focus on integration and open standards allows media organizations to meet the demands of the rapidly changing media distribution and consumer landscape.

For individuals and organizations, the costs associated with digitizing, hosting, and perpetually preserving archived material may be prohibitive. Repositories using the Reach Engine, such as the USC Digital Repository, offer clients an infrastructural and operational model that scales, based on library size and usage, and makes it possible to manage digital collections in a cost-effective manner.

Levels Beyond’s Reach Engine Studio is part of a cost-effective, multi-vendor video production environment, integrating with the leading content editors, transcoders and delivery solutions to securely and seamlessly streamline complex workflows around video creation, library management, packaging and distribution to traditional and non-traditional media outlets.