Brat TV is a digital network and production company that draws its name from “The Brat Pack” of ‘80s cinema. Its TV-quality programming such as Chicken Girls, Total Eclipse, Mani, are posted every day to YouTube and tailored to the Gen-Z audience.
The Brat TV YouTube channel has more than 3.5 million subscribers. To fund expanded programming, Brat TV has raised $40 million from Anchorage Capital, Shari Redstone’s Advancit Capital, and NBA all-star Kevin Durant.
Brat was juggling a fleet of hard drives, managing multiple instances of the same data across them. This cost them 12 hours a day across their four Assistant Editors, who were copying multiple terabytes of RAW camera files and editorial proxies a day.
Redundancy and uncertainty are a given with drive-based workflows, unless every transaction is meticulously documented. That is exactly what Brat had to do, manage drives with spreadsheets so they could track down where they are and what is on them. As they scaled up, this workflow became unsustainable and they needed a centralized location to store and access all of their media assets.
“creative.space has saved the company so much time! They’ve cut out a lot of foot traffic and allowed us to move more processes in-house without extra hoops. As a company that is developing and delivering finished scripted narratives on a consistent weekly basis, this has allowed us to restructure the company in a steadier and tighter manner across all verticals. The integration of everything in one location cuts out variables that trickle all the way down.”
Chase Logan
Head of Post Production, Brat TV
Brat's post production department heads were able to convince management to invest in creative.space, by demonstrating the monthly savings. creative.space's unique business model allowed the storage to pay for itself within the first month, by eliminating 12 hours a day of time spent managing data across direct attached hard drives.
With a team of 20+ editors working across multiple creative applications, creative.space's software provides benefits beyond a traditional hardware appliance.
Brat was able to consolidate all of their Productions, from across multiple copies on hard drives, to virtual Spaces that users can mount to their desktop and collaborate in together. This created a single directory structure for each Production to keep everything in and then archive to LTO tape for future use.
“Ever since the earliest adoption of using creative.space in our workflow, it's been a step in the direction of what I like to call the 'Holy Grail' of Post Production, which is integrating Media Asset Management with workflow... It's been a tool to integrate a bunch of different workflows into that Holy Grail of one workflow."
Taylor Bynum
Director of Post Production Operations, Brat TV
The creative.space Desktop App allows Brat's entire team to view all the Spaces they have access to and mount them with a single click. No more keeping track of IP addresses. Users can even bookmark the Spaces and folders they use more often for quick access.
Snapshots allow Brat to create read-only backups of their Spaces that they can navigate to restore deleted and modified files and folders from. The underlying ZFS filesystem checksums every block of data, which it uses to check for and self-heal any data corruption that might happen as hard drives age.
Brat's //DEUS EX has over 300 TB of usable capacity, which is accessed by users over a combination of 1 and 10 GbE connections. Avid Media Composer editors can work with Spaces as if they were native Avid storage, complete with Bin Locking.
“The //DEUS EX has met our expectations in terms of speed, connectivity, features and security. Our main goal was really to get a connected storage solution that would allow people across our different verticals to utilize the spaces in their respective editing and finishing software. We need it to work with Adobe, Avid and DaVinci seamlessly and grant administrators the controls they need to make sure the media is managed properly, which it absolutely has done.”
Chase Logan
Head of Post Production, Brat TV
Migrating to creative.space led to additional unexpected benefits. Previous silo'd departments were able to collaborate in parallel and the time saved allowed them to pursue new revenue opportunities, which has led to advertising deals with major brands.