A+E overhauls operations in move to west London

The company behind the History, Crime + Investigation and Blaze channels vacated its Osterley home this week to take up residence on the fifth floor of One Queen Caroline Street, a building previously owned by Coca Cola.

The 25,000 sq ft space will house around 200 staff, including 170 from the UK joint venture, which is 50% owned by Sky, and approximately 30 from A+E Networks’ international corporate office.

Importantly, the operations team has moved with it, taking up residence in a purpose-built space that has fewer edit suites but an increased number of ‘preditor’ stations for producer/editors and consolidated storage and asset management capabilities.

Led by Don Jarvis, A+E’s senior vice-president of engineering and technology in New York, the changes include a migration from Avid editing systems to Adobe Premiere Pro, the removal of legacy storage systems in favour of a single 1 petabyte system from Pixit, the addition of a 10GigE network and the outsourcing of compliance and reversioning work to TVT. Remote editing options are also being added.

A+E Networks UK vice-president of operations Matthew Westrup told Broadcast: “The move is a physical manifestation of a wider technology strategy.

“We are trying to go to a more automated, data-driven environment where we have better control of our supply chain and we can release the potential in both systems and staff and have better care of content, with more craft, more creativity and less inefficiency.”

Gearhouse Broadcast was the primary systems integrator on the 12-month project with Magenta Broadcast responsible for IT and broadcast networks, post-production, workflow and storage.