Case Studies
Cloudfirst Future Proofs 100 Years of NHL Hockey History with a Zero Impact Archive Strategy
Preserving a century of Hockey while enabling cloud scale innovation
For more than a century, the NHL has captured and preserved the defining moments of professional hockey. This archive, spanning historic games, legendary players, iconic venues, and cultural milestones, represents one of the most valuable sports media collections in the world.
By the time this transformation began, the NHL was managing approximately 15 petabytes of archived content held on an on-premises proprietary tape based legacy archive tightly integrated with an aging MAM system. While still supporting daily production, the aging and proprietary platform introduced growing operational risk, long term sustainability concerns, and limited flexibility for future innovation.
Cloudfirst Helps Trece (COPE Group) Eliminate Legacy Archive Lock In and Regain Full Control of Media Assets on AWS
Trece (13TV), part of COPE Group, began its archive modernisation journey several years ago by migrating archive content to AWS Cloud. The initial strategy relied on the legacy archive platform (DIVA) to manage the relationship between archive content and cloud storage. While the content successfully moved into AWS, Trece remained dependent on the on-prem archive system to access and manage their own media.
When Trece decided to decommission the legacy archive platform, a critical issue emerged: the archive system had become the gatekeeper to content already stored in AWS. Trece was effectively forced to continue maintaining aging infrastructure, software licensing, and vendor support services simply to retain access to their own archive assets.
Trece engaged Cloudfirst to remove proprietary archive dependencies, eliminate vendor lock-in, and restore direct access to assets in AWS, without disruption to operations.
Scalable Migration to Support Enterprise MAM Modernisation and AWS Archive Transformation
National Geographic Channel is home to one of the world’s most iconic documentary and factual content libraries. As part of a major transformation programme, National Geographic introduced a new enterprise Media Asset Management (MAM) platform designed to modernise downstream workflows, enable enhanced discovery, and improve global access to content.
However, unlike many archive transformations where assets can be migrated directly from legacy tape to cloud storage, National Geographic’s new enterprise MAM required assets to be locally registered during migration operations. This created a unique operational challenge. High resolution archive assets needed to land on local storage first, so the MAM could detect their arrival, generate proxies, and complete metadata registration, before they could be transitioned into AWS.
