The BBC, the world’s leading public service broadcaster, makes it their mission to enrich people’s lives with programs that inform, educate and entertain a wide audience. From television and radio to breaking news, BBC constantly delivers world-class content around the globe.

In 2012 BBC broadcasted its critically acclaimed Planet Earth Spring program following the lives of some of the world’s most magnificent creatures. Covering five locations throughout the world from Kenya to California, the project required that large amounts of high definition video footage be transferred from many geographically dispersed areas to headquarters for post-production, editing, and playout.

Because of the inherent problems associated with transferring large files via HTTP and FTP such as latency and packet loss, the transfer times for these videos were unacceptably slow and sometimes failed altogether, resulting in avoidable downtime and overall workflow inefficiency.

BBC, a customer of FileCatalyst integration partner Quicklink since 2003, routinely uses Quicklink’s outstanding Store and Forward solutions for its file-based reporting. To help transfer huge amounts of data and edited video files, BBC implemented the Store and Forward LNG solution that was integrated with FileCatalyst’s accelerated and managed file transfer solutions.

Store and Forward is a method implemented by Quicklink by which a video file is digitized into a computer and stored on the hard disk. The large video file is then compressed using Quicklink’s extremely high-quality compression, resulting in much smaller files that are easier and faster to transfer. After the file is encoded, even slow or unstable networks can be used to transmit files broadcast quality files quickly. The file may be transmitted either to a user’s single Quicklink Playout server or transferred to Quicklink’s News Warehouse Cloud for further distribution.

The solution enabled the BBC team to film, edit and transfer all of their video content from across the globe at blazing speeds and distribute the finished footage to 140 countries worldwide. The deployed solution of the Store and Forward LNG software, with FileCatalyst as its file acceleration engine, enabled enhanced file transfers via UDP, parallel FTP, and HTTP. This integration made it possible to move large format video files at maximum line speed while providing security, reliability, and automation. With these additional enhanced methods from QuickLink and FileCatalyst, BBC was able to achieve speeds hundreds of times faster than traditional methods, ensuring the delivery of large, high-quality files from anywhere in the world.