LONDON—As Europe’s largest media company, Sky Group delivers premium content at a scale few media companies can match. Operating across multiple markets has meant managing a patchwork of siloed systems, inconsistent tooling, different operational practices and varied compliance requirements, preventing us from fully leveraging economies of scale.
Our challenge required not only a technically innovative approach to future-proof Sky’s content supply chain, but also a long-term strategic solution that would unify operations across the Group.
In short, we needed a radical shift onto a single platform.
One Group, One Platform
To address this, we built MediaMesh, a unified cloud platform that centralizes QC, enrichment, conversion, and distribution at scale. The MediaMesh architecture—an API-driven, modular framework—brings together a curated ecosystem of in-house built microservices and products from leading industry partners, each selected for their ability to solve specific pain points.
For this project, we partnered with several companies, including SDVI, whose Rally platform provided the base layer that integrates with new and legacy tooling to retrieve metadata and media from dispersed systems and storage, in order to orchestrate content through the group’s platform.
Telestream’s Qualify serves as the automated quality control (QC) function at ingest, validating assets against Sky’s technical standards before proceeding further. Through close collaboration with operations, years of QC data were audited to optimize a system that flags issues early and reduces false positives compared to legacy tools, significantly minimizing manual review effort and downstream issues.
AWS ran AI to identify on-screen subtitles and spoken language to automatically identify localization requirements to fast-track downstream dubbing and subtitling efforts. This language detection has also allowed Sky Italia viewers to filter content by precise audio language, unlocking new levels of discoverability and personalization.
Codemill’s Accurate.Video platform not only plays back content, but provides a collection of audio controls, the ability to enable/disable subs and dubs for review and can present different time-based markers along a timeline (e.g., segmentation points, QC errors, sections needing localization).
We also deployed TMT Insights’ Polaris, which provides operations with a single platform identity, abstracting them from the multiple backend services, to streamline their operational practices. The Polaris UI provides visibility into metadata, end-to-end monitoring, workflow anomalies, prioritizes task management for steps requiring human intervention, communication threading and launching specialized functions such as editing tasks, various exports and ad hoc workflows. These functions help operations meet critical SLAs with confidence, reduce touchpoints, and speed up time to air.
Whether it’s ingesting content from over 300 content partners, enriching it with metadata and access services, or distributing it to platforms like Sky Glass and NOW, MediaMesh ensures every step is automated, observable, and streamlined. And the elastic scalability allocates sufficient system resources to meet the changing business demands.
To deliver a platform as ambitious as MediaMesh, we had to rethink not just our technology stack, but our internal capabilities. This meant evolving from a traditional broadcast engineering mindset to a software-first organization. TV engineers retrained as software engineers, embracing cloud-native development and modern DevOps practices. This transformation has not only accelerated delivery but fostered a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.
Business Benefits
By centralizing workflows, we can develop and deploy features once, rather than duplicating effort across multiple systems, delivering consistent benefits across the entire group. This streamlines internal investment and speeds up our time-to-market when delivering new features. Today, MediaMesh processes more than 2.7 million assets annually, equating to more than 10 million minutes of content, and manages around $2 billion worth of media across our ecosystem.
As we continue to evolve MediaMesh, we’re exploring new ways to enrich content, streamline compliance, and personalize viewer experiences across markets. The platform’s modular design ensures we can adapt quickly, whether it’s integrating new services, responding to regulatory changes or supporting future product launches. MediaMesh has laid the foundation for a more agile, scalable and collaborative future at Sky, and we’re excited to build on this momentum to shape next-generation content processing.
More information is available at www.telestream.net.
