How Spotify scaled out its podcast production
User spotlight
The video creative and post-production teams at Spotify can have as many as 40 people. Ben ensures they have the media they need with the most efficient workflows possible.
Ben Meadors
Manager, Post-Production Technology | Spotify
Ejecting an external hard drive workflow
One of the first challenges Ben took on was to remove the limitations presented by an external hard drive workflow.
- The workflow centered around duplicating content
- It could not scale-out easily
- It slowed production
- It required frequent backups
- It required moving content between drives for editing
- It came with logistical challenges and liabilities when shipping physical drives between locations
It was quite a large challenge for just one person, so Ben reached out to Peter Price at CHESA to help him build a new solution.
"When we first met with Spotify, we knew that they needed a scalable and flexible eco system to manage their media, which could equally be customized by comprehensive and available API's. Iconik fit that requirement perfectly"
Peter Price, Vice President of Solutions, CHESA
Here's what they did:
On-premise content is stored on Open Drives shared storage in multiple geographic locations, and indexed in iconik. The Iconik Storage Gateway (ISG) manages these storages and sends proxy versions into the iconik cloud. Any content stored in the cloud is also indexed in iconik.
This offers a complete view over all assets in the different locations from anywhere. Users can then use iconik to search, preview, download, and request the originals as needed.
Now, all of Spotify’s podcast content is available to editors from the cloud. No more shipping hard drives!
Connecting creators
Spotify has five studios under it making podcast and video content. The episodic nature of podcasts requires quick delivery times and rotating teams of freelancers.
That’s a lot of people who need to stay in sync with each other.
To begin with, none of the five studios used a media management solution. This made it easy to introduce iconik into their processes. The primary purpose of iconik here is to provide Spotify access to the final master assets. Assets are then backed up to the cloud and tagged. Each studio has its own well-established way of working. Spotify made sure to create solutions that wouldn’t be disruptive or add complexity.
The ISG allowed iconik to be inserted wherever it worked best. No major changes were required, and each studio gained the advantage of the hybrid cloud.
With iconik managing Spotify’s media, it made sense to use its collaboration features as well. Other video collaboration tools had been used in the past, but iconik could replace those and simplify things even more.
“One of the most appealing things about iconik is that it's a one-stop shop for post-production. We've been able to streamline our workflow significantly by combining asset management with the sharing, collaboration, and transcription tools inside iconik.”
Ben Meadors
Today, iconik is very embedded into the everyday workflow of Spotify’s video teams.
Video teams use iconik to :
- Browse content
- Search for media
- Share media
- Import media to Adobe projects
- Review content
- Comment and draw on video
- Transcribe media