FremantleMedia Facilitates Access Through Wazee Digital Core

Wazee Digital announces that global content company FremantleMedia has begun using Wazee Digital Core for enterprise-level asset management in the cloud. In doing so, FremantleMedia now has a central global resource for managing, researching, viewing, sharing, and selling its content.

“We chose the Core platform not only because it’s available as a secure cloud solution, but because it is backed by a team dedicated to continually improving services tailored to the M&E market and willing to collaborate with its clients to meet their business needs,” says Chad Hamilton, vice president, technology, FremantleMedia North America. “Core makes it possible for FremantleMedia to do what we do best: focus on creating content and delivering it to our clients on any platform on a global scale.”

FremantleMedia, a global content creator with offices in 31 markets, produces and distributes some of the world’s best known content across traditional TV and digital platforms at a rate of more than 10,000 hours of programming per year.

It uses Core, Wazee Digital’s enterprise software-as-a-service asset management platform built specifically for the cloud, to store, view, manage, and sell assets going back more than 60 years. FremantleMedia’s Core library contains over 200,000 assets — more than 20,000 hours of programs — and counting, which any internal FremantleMedia user with the appropriate permissions can access easily and securely from anywhere in the world.

Importantly, Core meets three of FremantleMedia’s most important criteria: It integrates with major social media platforms; it enables custom carts for internal/external client review; and it provides access for eventual direct content sales to the public. Besides making it easier for FremantleMedia to monetize its vast catalog of content, those capabilities can yield other benefits in terms of workflow, creativity, revenue, and cost savings.

For example, any authorized employees can search, preview, clip, share, or otherwise use any asset in the catalog to apply it to their own productions or fulfill requests from others. It has unfettered access to the entire FremantleMedia catalog through a web browser that often produces significant intangible benefits for large media companies such as FremantleMedia. It empowers any employee to come up with content that could lead to new streams of revenue.

Employee access also greatly increases the efficiency of many revenue-generating workflows, such as social media syndication. That efficiency, coupled with Core’s social media integration, could have a profound business impact on FremantleMedia, whose assets are the most viewed of any production company on YouTube.

When it comes to costs, FremantleMedia has identified significant savings from centralizing its asset management in house. By implementing Core, FremantleMedia was able to eliminate the fee-for-access storage services it was using before, which required employees to call upon postproduction vaults and bonded warehouses to locate content on tapes or film and make viewing copies before they could even consider using the content in question. Those services added up to a considerable expense, hampered access to the company’s own assets, and ultimately stifled creativity — problems that FremantleMedia has overcome by making it possible to find assets through Core with any modern browser.

“Fremantle is a content powerhouse with one of the most valuable catalogs in the world for a production company,” says Harris Morris, CEO of Wazee Digital. “That a media company of this size, history, and breadth — with such an amazing track record of maximizing its assets and brand — would choose a cloud-based, off-the-shelf, SaaS product like Wazee Digital Core is a prime example of how the M&E industry is moving away from custom on-premises solutions and embracing the many benefits the cloud has to offer.”