ABOVE & Warner Bros. Discovery: A new media partnership with open wings to fly

The cooperation between these two prominent IFE media players (Touch Inflight Solutions and CastLabs) will accelerate and improve the distribution of TV content from Warner Bros. Discovery, including Warner Bros., HBO, HBOMax globally, and Turner in the USA. The TV content from these brands will be managed, prepared, and distributed by ABOVE’s cloud-based media platform, the first of its kind in the IFE industry.  

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The transition to the new technology began in December 2021, and ABOVE started delivering services to Warner Bros. Discovery customers & partners, content service providers, and airlines in January 2022.

ABOVE is an open, standards-based platform for the encoding, storage, and distribution of video and related metadata through cloud-based services.

“What the ABOVE platform enables is a one-stop-shop solution,” says André Valera, Co-Managing Director and Vice President of Business Development at ABOVE. This means that Warner Bros. Discovery’s customers and partners

“will be able to press a button to get a TV episode, which automatically gets prepared, processed and delivered.”

In most instances, the process can take less than 24-hours, a ground-breaking turnaround time for the IFE industry.  

In addition, “fully customized formats for the IFE platforms onboard any aircraft in the world can be ordered through an output delivery workflow that drastically reduces cost and accelerates lead time to get media to aircraft,” says Michael Stattmann, Co-Managing Director and Chief Technical Officer at ABOVE. “We’re building on the trusted and studio-approved expertise of CastLabs for protecting and securely delivering premium content through cloud-based post-production and distribution workflows which allows us to build a virtual post-production lab with little effort. ABOVE is extending the functionality with a lightweight cloud-native business process automation and API to streamline integration with content licensees. We’re also leveraging the power of standards like EIDR to create an open and interoperable content inventory.”, he added.

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ABOVE and its integrated solution constitute a significant step forward to help streamline and simplify media processing and build a more digitally integrated supply chain for the IFE ecosystem. Building on the combined strengths of ABOVE and Warner Bros. Discovery, the partnership is truly a “match made in heaven” that will bring the quality of the onboard guest experience to new heights.

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