Press

Spafax’s Technical Facility, The Hub, Focused on Scalable Solutions for a Post-COVID World

20 Aug 2020
7 minutes

Global entertainment and media agency Spafax today announced the details of its technology roadmap as well as The Hub’s continued commitment to support and deliver to its clients during the COVID-19 crisis. Since the onset of COVID-19, Spafax’s global offices, along with its staff at The Hub in California have adopted a remote work protocol established by its parent company WPP.

Tony Taverner, Chief Technology Officer at Spafax said:

”When the COVID-19 crisis hit, The Hub worked to ensure that our clients and partners could count on our normal levels of service excellence and delivery. I am proud to share that we have not only continued to deliver continuity in our service, we are increasingly supporting more industry partners during this difficult time.”

Sprint™ will enable us to take source content, prepare it and place it on the integrator’s network within hours for loading to aircraft and truly deliver on our clients’ ambitions to break the content cycle.
Tony Taverner

Paul Colley, Senior Vice President of Technology at Spafax said:

“Our technical deliverables have doubled every two years for the past decade. Given this track record in our growth, we have proactively invested in scalable solutions built for the digital model of the future. Sprint™, our cloud ingestion, encoding and delivery pipeline will enable us to take source content, prepare it and place it on the integrator’s network within hours for loading to aircraft and truly deliver on our clients’ ambitions to break the content cycle.”

In this context, Spafax has three key pillars for its technical platform:

1. Scalability

  • Cloud infrastructure (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure)
  • Automation

2. Content Security

  • MPA Cloud Compliance
  • TPN Membership

3. Formats

  • H265 (High Efficiency Video Encoding HEVC)
  • 4K
  • CMAF (Common Media Application Format)

The Hub highlights:

  • Since the 2015 launch of The Hub, Spafax has continuously invested in digital technologies, most recently for its cloud ingestion, encoding and delivery pipeline to enable cost- and time-savings.
  • With the onset of COVID-19, Spafax has accelerated the development of its digital tech projects and is set to launch its real-time content automation and distribution platform Sprint™ in Q4 of 2020.
  • “Breaking The Content Cycle”: Sprint™ enables Spafax to deliver content updates at all times of the month and with much shorter lead times.
  • Spafax is reimagining its content acquisition and planning processes to enable all parts of the content delivery pipeline.
  • 2020 marks The Hub’s five-year anniversary since opening at Sunset Gower Studios in the heart of Hollywood.
  • The Hub currently supports 22 IFE systems and delivers over 50,000 files per month to over 20 airlines and several industry partners.
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