OUTtv is a Canadian broadcaster that has successfully evolved into a leading LGBTQ+ multi-platform entertainment brand, spanning direct-to-consumer apps and partnerships with major platforms like Apple, Amazon, Roku, and YouTube. Today, OUTtv distributes content, including original productions, licensed series, films, and documentaries across 14 countries and five continents, continually expanding into new territories and platforms like FAST channels.
Samantha Amaral, OUTtv’s Manager of Broadcast and OTT Operations, oversees the network’s entire technical workflow—from ingesting masters and managing archives to delivering to global partners. Her team is the backbone of broadcast and digital distribution, tasked with ensuring high-value content moves quickly, securely, and reliably across a growing operational footprint.
The Business Weight of Inefficiency
OUTtv’s expanding global reach quickly exposed the limitations of its legacy file transfer methods. Initially, the team relied on a mix of office hard drives for archiving and consumer-grade tools like Dropbox, WeTransfer, and Google Drive for transfers. This system quickly became unsustainable as file sizes increased and workflows became more complex.
A typical delivery package for OUTtv is comprehensive, requiring a ProRes master (HQ422 or 444), texted and textless files, split-track audio, marketing materials, closed captions, and metadata. When relying on legacy FTP, downloading these large packages could take two to three days, severely bogging down workstations and creating significant bottlenecks in the workflow. In addition, a substantial part of their archived library remained on local hard drives, creating a risk of content loss. With shrinking timelines and a growing need for a professional-grade, reliable solution, a change was critical.
How OUTtv Found Its Flow
The initial driver for a new solution was the need to modernize archives. This quickly expanded into a full-scale delivery and ingest solution after OUTtv learned about Signiant through a streaming platform partner.
After evaluating various options, Signiant was chosen for three key factors:
- Acceleration to support growing 4K workloads and meet aggressive delivery deadlines.
- Security that satisfied strict legal and partner requirements for high-value content.
- Simplicity for easy producer onboarding and minimal delivery errors.
Since implementing Signiant, the most dramatic impact has been the reduction in content submission and transfer times. What once stretched into days for a typical delivery package now only takes hours. This efficiency has eliminated major bottlenecks, giving Amaral’s seven-person team the confidence to scale operations, take on more partners, and expand to new locations without compromising timelines or requiring additional headcount. Even for re-deliveries, the turnaround is now a couple of hours instead of a couple of days.
Protecting Every Frame
While speed was the priority, security was an equally critical component of OUTtv’s decision, especially for content with stringent legal terms and compliance requirements. Signiant’s secure transfer protocols provided the enterprise-grade protection needed to keep sensitive, high-value content safe at every step of the workflow.
This combination of features has been transformative. Signiant utilizes proprietary acceleration technology to move content up to 100x faster than standard internet transmission speeds used by legacy tools like FTP. Simultaneously, its intuitive, user-friendly interface allows producers of all experience levels to easily deliver content through OUTtv branded portals.
Amaral states, “Signiant brings a professional level of file transfer that you don’t get with the other consumer-based tools. It’s leveled us up to a different league with file management.” This shift has provided the operations team with peace of mind, allowing them to focus on high-value tasks instead of troubleshooting transfers or worrying about unnecessary risk exposure.
The Foundation of Growth
The transition to Signiant has given OUTtv a stable foundation for the future. By smoothing out the delivery process from third-party producers and establishing a clear delivery path, the company has eliminated complexity and built a system that easily scales.
“It speaks volumes of what we can do now because we are not tied up in our processes and are continually changing as we grow,” Amaral explained. What started as a simple solution for faster transfers has snowballed into the operational infrastructure supporting OUTtv’s continued global expansion. With Signiant at the core of its operations, OUTtv is positioned to keep innovating and championing LGBTQ+ storytelling on a global stage, making a return to hard drives or FTP unimaginable.
