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I have had the pleasure of working with various members of the Mammoth team over a 10-year period, and am full of praise for their services. I deal with a multitude of web development and design teams, but I am yet to find a company that I could recommend as being more hardworking, thorough, reliable, innovative and customer-focussed.
Lara Ackroyd - Media, Applications & User Experience , Telstra Innovation, Products & Marketing

T-Box Launches in Time for Christmas

“Mammoth Media saved us close to three months of manual effort in providing an automated solution to the T-Box metadata refresh. We wouldn’t have been able to finish the refresh in time if it wasn’t for their assistance.” – BigPond Movies

  • Saved an estimated three months manual effort
  • Allowed Bigpond Movies to meet the challenging T-Box launch deadline
  • Innovative use of image matching to automate the process

the situation

The Movies team at Telstra Media were presented with a problem. The launch of the Telstra T-Box and its interface to the BigPond Movies site was given an accelerated completion date to coincide with Christmas sales. They had a goal to update the images and OFLC information for their extensive library of movies within four weeks to support the T-Box release before the holidays, and that’s where Mammoth’s team stepped in.  

A number of challenges were apparent in providing content in a format compatible with the T-Box interface. All images were required to be of a certain file size, image size, quality and shape. All OFLC information required updating according to instructions from a regulatory body.

Up to this point all movie information was updated manually into a proprietary media management system known as thePlatform. Despite a well-documented and understood process to update the data it was estimated it would take upwards of 12 weeks and numerous data entry resources to complete.

the solution

Due to our track record on delivering to tight deadlines, and our integration experience, Mammoth Media was asked to assist by providing an analysis of the situation, and estimate how much of the documented update process could be automated. It was expected that some manual updating would also be required.

Mammoth Media was able to automate the entire documented update process from end to end within the four week time frame.

During this four week period we also suggested we could utilise the OFLC website directly to provide source information. This proved to be challenging as some movie titles were different between OFLC and the Bigpond Movies site, as well as having multiple movies with the same title. The Mammoth team came up with a solution to utilise a combination of known data and image matching algorithms to ensure we were matching like for like movies between the OFLC website and thePlatform.

Initial testing showed there were limitations on the T-Box hardware around the supported image file size that were not readily apparent at the beginning of the process. Once again, the Mammoth team were able to come up with an automated solution. We took in a myriad of different image file types and sizes, automatically converting, resizing, shaping and ensuring the compressed quality of the image was suitable for display on the T-Box. This was integrated into the solution to ensure we were using a single repeatable process within a day of receiving the request. We understood the pressure to release before Christmas and were happy to do everything we could to assist.

results

Telstra T-Box achieved its Christmas release. Without Mammoth Media automating the entire process, integrating OFLC and thePlatform as well as dynamically and automatically processing thousands of images through a one step process, the Movies team at Telstra Media would have been unable to support the Telstra T-Box accelerated launch.