Partnering with SDVI, Mediagenix, and TMT Insights, Anuvu leveraged a cloud-enabled media supply chain to boost efficiency and agility.
Summary
This case study describes how Anuvu—partnering with SDVI, Mediagenix, and TMT Insights—modernized its complex, global content-delivery operations through a cloud-enabled media supply chain. The transformation improved speed, accuracy, and scalability, significantly boosting Anuvu’s performance and market share in the airline entertainment sector.
Key Ideas and Data Points:
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Scale of Operations:
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Supports 150+ airlines globally, managing 50,000+ masters annually across 125 formats with multi-language localization.
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Challenges Before Modernization:
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Relied on manual workflows using spreadsheets and email; prone to errors, missed deadlines, and data inconsistencies.
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Cloud Transformation Approach:
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SDVI Rally for orchestration and automation; Mediagenix On-Demand for scheduling and metadata; TMT Insights Polaris for operational oversight.
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Operational Improvements:
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Automation of ingest, QC, transcoding, and packaging; real-time visibility into workflows via Rally.
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On-time delivery increased to 95–99%, nearly 100% for complete (“workable”) assets.
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Error rates fell below 1%, even across 15,000 files per month.
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Business Impact:
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Market share grew from ~45% to nearly 60%, attracting new major airline partners.
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Improved agility let airlines take longer to approve content, enhancing creativity and client satisfaction.
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Key Takeaway:
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Cloud-native automation and integration transformed Anuvu’s manual, siloed systems into a scalable, data-driven supply chain, achieving measurable gains in efficiency, reliability, and growth.
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As the largest independent provider of in-flight and maritime entertainment, Anuvu delivers movies, television, audio, games, and connectivity services to airlines around the world. By preparing, planning, and delivering content, as well as related metadata, Anuvu empowers these clients to bring streaming-style entertainment experiences to passengers, wherever they travel.
Only by modernizing its media supply chain has Anuvu been able to realize the speed, consistency, and flexibility necessary to deliver the top-notch services that its clients and their passengers demand.
“While we have developers in-house, it just wasn’t feasible for us to create a completely digital supply chain on our own,” says Jim Reed, VP of Media Operations at Anuvu. “In building an all-encompassing supply chain, we need bespoke workflows for every client, a unique workflow for every one of the 800+ platforms we serve. Rather than spend five years of R&D to build a solution from scratch, we opted to go with proven products capable of giving us the flexibility and efficiency our operations require.”
Partnering with SDVI and Mediagenix, Anuvu implemented a cloud-native media supply chain that automates workflows end-to-end, improves efficiency, and enables new levels of scale and agility. During the early stages of this transformation, TMT Insights served as an integration partner, helping Anuvu to stand up the new environment and establish more effective management and collaboration across its operations.
Challenge: Managing Complexity at Scale
Anuvu delivers entertainment content to airlines and maritime partners around the world, processing tens of thousands of masters each year across more than a hundred formats and hundreds of onboard platforms. The company provides localized content and metadata to meet travelers’ desire for an experience that mirrors what they enjoy at home: rich metadata, intuitive interfaces, and a wide, constantly refreshed catalog of content. This metadata details key aspects of each title, including genres, release years, maturity ratings, runtimes, and more, helping passengers quickly discover what suits their interests. By empowering travelers to make informed viewing choices, this title information plays a crucial role in enhancing the overall inflight entertainment experience.
Meeting all these demands for its airline clients involves managing extraordinary complexity, often at scale.
Aircraft typically remains in service for 20 to 25 years and are retrofitted every eight years or so, which means content providers must support decades of legacy technologies alongside the newest digital formats. Thus, at any given time, Anuvu delivers across three decades of audio and video standards, from analog tapes to UHD digital files, while accommodating more than 125 different metadata standards and the wide array of seatback systems used across the industry.
Airlines also require a wide variety of versions to meet regulatory, cultural and audience needs. Each title may need to be edited for in-flight viewing, localized into multiple languages and packaged for specific hardware configurations. Subtitles and dubs must be created and approved quickly, often with just days to turn around a version for delivery. These requirements are constant and non-negotiable, regardless of the number of clients being served.
Before Anuvu’s transition to cloud-based workflows, much of this work depended on manual processes. Teams relied on spreadsheets, email threads, and a patchwork of disconnected systems to track assets and hand off tasks. Each step requires human intervention, logging titles, confirming rights, moving files, or flagging edits, and every handoff introduced opportunities for error. Files could be mislabeled, metadata misapplied, or deadlines missed because critical information was stored in multiple places or updated in one system but not another. Operators spent hours reconciling inconsistent data, searching for missing files, and chasing status updates across teams. The airlines’ monthly content update cycles compounded these inefficiencies, with the sheer volume of assets moving through the system making accurate, on-time delivery even more challenging.
Solution: An Integrated Cloud Supply Chain
A cloud-enabled media supply chain was the clear option for Anuvu in transforming its operations for more efficient preparation and delivery of entertainment content. The company embraced automation and highly orchestrated operations in place of fragmented manual processes. Rather than deploy a monolithic solution to support this shift, Anuvu pursued a best-of-breed approach.
To begin its transformation, Anuvu chose AWS to provide their cloud infrastructure. In order to optimize orchestration, scheduling and management of the entire workflow, the company implemented SDVI’s Rally media supply chain management platform as well as the Mediagenix On-Demand content scheduling platform and TMT Insights’ Polaris operational management software platform, all integrated with existing systems. Close collaboration among these tech partners ensured that upstream changes flowed downstream smoothly, eliminating duplication and delays.
Content Acquisition & Rights
Within Anuvu’s transformed operations, every project begins with content acquisition and rights management. Titles and versions — whether for a theatrical cut, airline edit or localized version — are first structured in the Rightsline cloud-based rights management platform. Once rights are confirmed and a specific version is approved for distribution, an order is generated that sets the rest of the supply chain in motion.
Scheduling & Metadata
From there, scheduling and metadata are handled by Mediagenix On-Demand, which streamlines high-volume scheduling and metadata workflows across the diverse content formats required for the entertainment equipment on each aircraft. Because the platform links upstream rights management with downstream workflow automation, Anuvu can more effectively manage shifting delivery timelines, support global localization, and maintain metadata consistency while significantly improving content delivery speed.
“As the backbone of Anuvu’s scheduling and metadata operations, Mediagenix On-Demand connects upstream rights and downstream metadata transformation for seamless content delivery workflows,” says Eric Carson, managing director, Americas, at Mediagenix. “By unifying metadata and enhancing localization workflows, the platform helps Anuvu to adapt content for dozens of languages and hundreds of platforms with speed and precision. Integration with platforms from SDVI and TMT Insights not only facilitates rapid packaging and delivery but also simplifies and accelerates onboarding of new airline partners, without compromising consistency or control.”
The Anuvu scheduling team selects which titles, languages, and versions need to be delivered to which aircraft. Mediagenix On-Demand manages the complexity of metadata and rights information, ensuring consistency across hundreds of formats and dozens of languages. The Mediagenix platform also underpins localization at scale, centralizing translations and metadata so teams across offices and regions can adapt content for dozens of languages quickly. Based on the schedule generated in Mediagenix On-Demand, a formal work order is passed along to SDVI Rally.
Content Preparation
Through orchestration and automation of key content preparation processes, Rally serves as the engine that drives Anuvu’s media supply chain.
“We chose Rally as our supply chain management system so we could focus on delivering entertainment services, not managing cloud infrastructure,” explains Reed. “SDVI brought deep expertise in scaling cloud resources and support for critical content-preparation tools, including Adobe Premiere Pro for QC and compliance. Unlike more rigid products, Rally gave us the flexibility to design our own workflows, integrate all the tools we need, and build automation around them.”
With the Rally platform, Anuvu leverages cloud-native orchestration to automate ingest, QC, transcoding, and packaging. Integrating directly with third-party tools, the SDVI platform enables Anuvu to create and adapt custom workflows that meet clients’ unique format requirements. Editors use Adobe Premiere Pro to perform compliance edits and localization efficiently, ensuring content is suitable for airline passengers of different ages, cultures and regulatory environments. If assets such as dubs or subtitles are missing, Rally automatically flags the gaps so teams can source or create them, preventing costly delays downstream.
Rally provides full visibility into each step of the workflow, so teams can track progress in real time and focus their attention on managing exceptions rather than manually moving files or reconciling mismatched data. Dynamically scaling cloud resources to handle bursts of demand — such as monthly content updates — the platform helps to minimize delays and bottlenecks.
Operational Oversight
Polaris operational management software from TMT Insights provides a single-pane-of-glass view of the media supply chain from ingest to final delivery. Continually developed and refined by Anuvu’s media operations team, the software surfaces actionable insights through customizable interfaces, or dashboards, tailored to each user’s role. In addition to providing overall visibility, the software enables granular control over specific orders, jobs, and tasks, whether manual or automated, so that nothing falls through the cracks.
API integration with systems including SDVI Rally and Mediagenix On-Demand has eliminated the “swivel chair effect,” keeping operators in one interface rather than bouncing between spreadsheets, emails, and ad hoc tools to track deliverables. As Anuvu undertakes further transformation, the company’s operational management software helps not only to ease change management as legacy systems are deprecated, consolidated, or replaced but also to maintain visibility into the data that lives in those systems.
“When we first engaged with Anuvu, the company was modernizing system by system, with operations and team members remaining siloed,” recalls Hannah Barnhardt, managing partner at TMT Insights. “With deployment of Polaris, Anuvu effectively consolidated control and visibility across the company’s global operations. Acting as command and control for the entire supply chain, Polaris keeps operations running smoothly even as the complexity of formats, partners, and platforms continues to grow.”
The benefits have been both operational and strategic. Building on TMT Insights’ software and expert guidance, Anuvu has implemented an intuitive UI/UX that streamlines communication and collaboration among distributed teams, in turn accelerating adoption and minimizing disruption. Using the software to simplify bulk distribution of catalogs and provide clear tracking of deliverables, Anuvu also has reduced lifecycle fulfillment times and positioned itself to capitalize on new revenue opportunities.
Delivery to Airline Clients
Once content and metadata are fully prepared, Rally either triggers automated delivery or flags titles that require special packaging. Polaris provides confirmation and reporting across all these delivery workflows, ensuring SLAs are met, and customers receive the content on time.
Result: Efficiency, Scale, and Growth
By moving to a cloud-based media supply chain, Anuvu realized the efficiency and agility needed to adapt quickly to diverse and changing customer requirements, as well as evolving passenger expectations.
With SDVI Rally orchestrating content preparation, Anuvu now imports, processes, and delivers more than 50,000 masters each year to 80 airline customers in accordance with 125 metadata standards. Mediagenix On-Demand provides a centralized platform for efficient scheduling and metadata management, and Polaris adds the operational command layer, streamlining communication and collaboration across global teams, with transparency across the entire supply chain.
Together, these systems have transformed both workflows and their results. On-time delivery rose to between 95% and 99%, and nearly 100% for “workable” assets with all required elements available. Error rates have dropped below 1%, even as Anuvu delivers up to 15,000 files per month to major partners. Automation has reduced manual handoffs and repetitive tasks, freeing staff to focus on exceptions while keeping content moving around the clock. Global teams in the U.S., Argentina, China, and India now collaborate seamlessly to maintain a true 24/7 operation.
“Because our on-time percentage went up, airlines realized they could take longer to approve content selections,” says Reed. “That gave them more creativity and flexibility — and it helped us win new business. We’ve grown our market share significantly, all because of the digital supply chain we’ve built.”
Anuvu has successfully transitioned from siloed, spreadsheet-driven operations to a highly automated, smoothly orchestrated, cloud-native media supply chain capable of delivering the streaming-like experience passengers expect, even at 35,000 feet. The business impact has been substantial. The company’s market share has grown from roughly 40–50% to nearly 60%, with several major airlines moving from long-standing providers to partner with Anuvu.
About Anuvu
Anuvu connects and entertains the world’s passengers. The company serves more than 150 airlines and 30 cruise-line customers worldwide, licensing, localizing, and delivering a catalog of over 400,000 titles. Recognized as the largest independent supplier of non-theatrical licensed Hollywood and international content, Anuvu is a leader in Bollywood and Asian cinema. The company also operates a powerful hybrid satellite and terrestrial network that ensures global service reliability across its content and connectivity offerings.