Case Study: Florida Panthers and EditShare: Keeping Content on Ice

When the NHL Florida Panthers video department needed a flexible, secure central storage system with convenient access for crews on the road, the ability to handle extremely sophisticated workflows, and more, they chose EditShare.

Florida Panthers and EditShare: Keeping Content on Ice

On premise and cloud storage supports busy production services

The Florida Panthers are the NHL ice hockey team based in Broward County. Recent successes – they played in the 2023 Stanley Cup Final – have placed even more pressure on the creative group in the video department.

As the team’s successes have grown, so too has the video department. It now leads with four producer/editors out creating a lot of stories for fan engagement, backed up by interns building their own skills and content.

Amerant Bank Arena in Sunrise, Florida, home of the Panthers, is of course equipped with a dynamic scoreboard system, and the video department also includes motion graphics artists creating exciting and engaging new sequences for every game. As well as the scoreboard, there are screens in all the zones of the Arena, which all depend on content from the in-house production team, as does the Panthers’ new retail store at its practice facility in Fort Lauderdale.

The amount of material passing through the unit is huge: stories, features and player interviews shot locally and when the team goes on the road; eight cameras in the Arena on game days plus feeds from Bally Sports Network the broadcast partner; and connectivity for all the post-production suites in the building.

All in all, there are a lot of assets which need managing.

Storage

As the workload increased, it was clear that the Panthers needed to support more users and sources simultaneously, and they needed to get shooting crews on the road into the production system as quickly as possible.

The unit needed a flexible, secure central storage system that could be readily accessed by everyone while remaining secure. It needed to support a lot of concurrent users, and the material had to be backed up as soon as practical.

Crews on the road needed access and ingest facilities using a secure VPN. It also needed to support a large number of live inputs as well as feeding outputs during matches.

Dennis Docil is the Senior Director of Content Services for the Florida Panthers, and he was tasked with identifying the best solution. Before returning to the Panthers, he had worked at Ion Media Networks, which was a very early adopter of EditShare technology, so he was familiar with what it could do. He analyzed what was available on the market, and EditShare came top of the list.

The architecture the Panthers went for includes a 256TB EFS300 storage node, installed in the department at the Arena. This is backed by cloud storage, which is maintained using EditShare FLEX cloud sync.

Workflow

“The benefits were immediate and obvious,” Dennis Docil said. “It gave us a simple way to keep track of what we have. The ability to tag and search through all our content was a revelation.”

Away from base, crews on the road could immediately ingest into the cloud, and it would be automatically replicated on the on-premises storage. Producers/editors could also access the entire content store over a secure VPN.

They can now edit complete stories on the road, something that was impossible before the EditShare installation. And not only are the packages they put together on the road more rounded and complete, they can be posted from wherever they are, so content hits the fanbase faster. That is really important when packaging roundups of away games.

The partnership with Bally Sports Network means that the broadcaster uses a lot of content originated by the Panthers. In turn, they provide a key game feed to supplement the team’s own cameras, all captured live and immediately available to editors and post-production platforms.

EditShare

“The recent successes of the team mean that there are a lot of eyeballs on us,” said Docil. “We are in the spotlight, and our workloads are increasing exponentially. We had to have a core workflow system that gave us what we needed – the ability to work at home and on the road; direct access for editors and other post people; powerful asset management, tuned to the specific requirements of sport; and the security of knowing all our material is backed up in the cloud.

“We looked at a number of systems, but EditShare definitely seemed to be the most user-friendly while delivering on all requirements,” he explained. “On top of that, the price was more attractive than the competition. We were able to order a comprehensive package with all the extra components we wanted – like cloud synchronization and direct access for editors – in one affordable fixed price.”

Today’s sports fans are always demanding. They expect high-quality coverage of the game, of course, but they want much more, through the Panthers app and website, as well as on screens around the live experience.

Operations like the video department of the Florida Panthers aim to humanize the players and bring them as people closer to the fans, as well as building loyalty to the team and excitement around its successes. That loyalty, excitement, and engagement also build revenues, increasing attendance and driving sales online and through the fan shop.

To produce all this content to a very high standard, and turn it around with the speed of a hockey game, calls for extremely sophisticated workflows, excellent asset management, and secure but readily accessed storage. The EditShare implementation for Florida Panthers delivers all this.