HCLTech implemented Media-IQ to migrate a multi-petabyte tape library, a physical data center, for a global entertainment powerhouse. By leveraging a "touch-and-go" ingestion strategy and GenAI-powered semantic search, we reduced retrieval times up to 90% and enabled instant monetization of historical IP.
The client is a premier global media and entertainment conglomerate, responsible for some of the world’s most iconic film franchises and television series. They operate a multi-platform content ecosystem spanning theatrical releases, linear networks and a rapidly growing direct-to-consumer streaming service.
The Challenge
The client possessed a 20PB+ archive of high-value video assets trapped in physical tape libraries, silos requiring manual maintenance and legacy NAS systems. As the business pivoted toward a streaming-first model, these legacy architectures became a bottleneck. The strategic priorities included:
- Democratizing access: Eliminating the "gatekeeper" reliance on physical tape operations to access historical IP
- Monetization speed: Reducing the time required to restore, remaster and redistribute back-catalog content for streaming platforms
- Cost control: Escaping the recurring cycle of multi-million dollar aging hardware refreshes (CapEx) and unpredictable maintenance costs
- AI readiness: Structuring metadata to enable future AI-driven content search and personalization
The Objective
The primary objective was to transition from a "store-and-forget" tape model to an active media supply chain. Additional goals of the project included:
- Preserve more, pay less: Reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) while ensuring 100% data durability and compliance
- Asset liquidity: Enable sub-second discovery of specific scenes and concepts
- Predictive readiness: Forecast demand to "pre-warm" assets before campaigns launch
The Solution
The approach was executed in a phased modernization framework to ensure business continuity while migrating at scale.
Phase 1: Discovery and architecture blueprinting
Requirements gathering
- Initial consultation: Conducted deep-dive sessions with studio operations, post-production and legal teams to map access patterns (hot vs. cold content) and define retention SLAs
- Risk assessment: Identified critical risks regarding "bit rot" in legacy tapes and the need for strict chain-of-custody tracking for pre-release content
Workshops and strategic planning
- Governance mapping: Defined a "Policy-before-Data" schema to automate retention and rights management
- Vault architecture: Established a "master vault" logic, clearly separating preservation assets from distribution (OTT) copies to set realistic SLAs and maximize durability
- Solution design: Created a robust migration runbook leveraging AWS DataSync for checksum-verified transfers and AWS Direct Connect to protect production bandwidth
- Proprietary decoupling: Designed a roadmap to remove dependency on proprietary tape management middleware (MWM), moving to open standard object storage
Phase 2: Intelligent migration and modernization
Migration success story
Automated and secure ingestion:
- High-velocity transfer: Utilized AWS DataSync to parallelize transfers from on-premise NAS, performing real-time checksums to ensure bit-perfect integrity of master files
- Snowball edge integration: For the deepest cold archives, bulk ingestion was accelerated using offline devices to bypass network limitations
- GenAI content intelligence: Invokes Amazon Bedrock Data Automation to extract descriptive metadata (celebrity, scene, sentiment) while AWS Lambda captures technical specs (codec, bitrate). This creates a 'multimodal index' in OpenSearch
- Mezzanine proxy generation: Upon ingest, the workflow triggers AWS Elemental MediaConvert to create lightweight H.264 proxies. These reside permanently in S3 Standard, allowing instant global preview and verification without incurring the cost or delay of restoring the high-res master from the vault
Smart tiering and orchestration:
- Lifecycle logic: Implemented Step Functions to orchestrate a "Touch-and-Go" strategy. Assets land in Amazon S3 Standard for immediate AI processing and Proxy generation, avoiding the 30-day minimum fees of IA tiers. Once processed, master files are transitioned in-place to Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive (master vault)
- Cost guardrails: Built custom logic to predict retrieval costs before execution, preventing accidental "restore shock" from deep archive tiers
Security and compliance:
- Immutability: Deployed S3 Object Lock in Compliance Mode to enforce retention mandates (7–10 years), making assets immutable to ransomware or accidental deletion
- Granular access: Implemented AWS IAM and bucket policies to ensure that only authorized creative teams could access high-value pre-release content
- Audit-ready: Replaced manual tape logs with AWS CloudTrail, providing a searchable, immutable history of every asset access request for internal and external auditors
Search and analytics Layer:
- Unified catalog: Indexed all technical and descriptive metadata into Amazon OpenSearch Service, enabling editors to search for content by director, year, resolution, or rights status in milliseconds
- Business insights: Deployed Amazon QuickSight dashboards to visualize storage consumption, identifying "zombie data" that could be moved to colder storage to save money
Predictive recalls:
- Governed prediction: Ingests external business signals (Marketing Calendars, Rights Management Data) via Amazon AppFlow. These signals are governed by Athena and fed into SageMaker to forecast demand
- Demand forecasting: This governed dataset feeds Amazon SageMaker to predict which assets will be needed for upcoming franchise anniversaries, triggering automatic "pre-warming" from the vault
Financial analysis
Moving from a physical tape library to a cloud-native model fundamentally changed the client's financial profile from a capital-intensive cost center to a predictable operational expense.
The "hidden costs" of legacy tape
Our analysis of the client's on-premise trajectory revealed significant financial friction:
- Unpredictable CapEx spikes: The legacy model required massive upfront capital for library frames and drives, followed by disruptive "refresh cycles" (e.g., migrating data to new tape generations every 5-7 years)
- High maintenance overhead: Annual support contracts and offsite vaulting fees added ~$500k/year in "keep the lights on" costs, regardless of how much data was actually retrieved
The OpEx advantage
By migrating to HCLTech’s AWS-based solution, the client achieved a "smooth" cash-flow profile:
- Linear spend: AWS costs stabilized and directly correlated to storage volume and retrieval activity
- Pay-as-you-go efficiency: The tiered architecture ensures that the massive master archive sits in Glacier Deep Archive (lowest cost), while only lightweight Proxies and temporary restores reside in S3 Standard. We eliminated the "30-day minimum duration" penalties associated with Infrequent Access tiers, ensuring the client pays only for the exact compute time used during ingestion
- Budgeting certainty: We replaced the "fiscal shock" of hardware end-of-life events with a predictable monthly operational model, simplifying long-term budgeting for the finance office
"Legacy tape is CapEx you can’t escape. The AWS Archive is OpEx you can plan for - not react to."
The Impact
We transformed the client’s archive from a liability into a dynamic asset, enabling faster time-to-market for their content and significant operational savings.
Accelerated time-to-market:
- Up to 90% faster restores: Reduced asset retrieval times from days (physical tape transport) to minutes/hours, enabling rapid response to streaming trends and promotional opportunities
- Productivity gains: Reduced manual "back-and-forth" emails between creative and storage teams by 50-70% through self-service APIs
Financial efficiency:
- Eliminated CapEx cycles: Removed the need for a multi-million dollar tape library refresh and ongoing maintenance contracts, shifting to a predictable pay-as-you-go OpEx model
- Cost optimization: Achieved a 50-70% reduction in storage run-rates by utilizing intelligent tiering to keep the majority of the 20PB library in the lowest-cost Glacier Deep Archive tiers
Operational resilience and innovation:
- Governance at speed: Reduced audit preparation time from weeks to hours, saving an estimated 28 person-days per year on compliance checks
- Increased "findability": Improved search-to-use conversion, ensuring valuable IP is not lost in the "digital attic" and can be easily repurposed for new revenue streams
- AI-ready foundation: The archive is now a structured data lake, ready for Generative AI workflows such as automated trailer creation, deep-search tagging and content localization
AWS Services Used
- Ingestion: AWS DataSync, AWS Direct Connect, AWS Snowball Edge, Amazon AppFlow
- Orchestration and compute: AWS Step Functions, AWS Lambda, Amazon EventBridge
- Storage: Amazon S3 (Standard and Glacier Deep Archive)
- Media and AI: AWS Elemental MediaConvert, Amazon Bedrock Data Automation, Amazon SageMaker
- Analytics and governance: Amazon Athena, AWS Glue, Amazon OpenSearch Service, Amazon QuickSight, AWS CloudTrail
