TV Asahi's Strategic Shift to Dropbox: Enhancing Efficiency and Security in Media Operations

Challenge: cloud-based file-sharing environment needed to help go paperless

Established in 1959, TV Asahi has been in the broadcasting business for more than 60 years. In recent years, it has also grown its internet TV businesses such as ‘AbemaTV’ and ‘TV Asahi Douga’ to meet evolving content viewing needs. Meanwhile, it’s increased its employee count as the business continues to expand. Gradually, Asahi TV outgrew its physical offices, and the lack of space to store tapes and other media became an issue. Hajime Yasuda, from TV Asahi’s Technical Affairs Department, explains:

"We urgently needed to reduce the volume of paper documents we were using. We’d introduced file servers and tablet devices in an attempt to go paperless, but it wasn’t easy to break away from our long-standing paper-based culture, with tens of thousands of TV show proposals being photocopied and handed out at meetings almost every week."

The process of going paperless also revealed certain problems. When we interviewed employees about their use of IT, we found that an unexpected number of them were already using consumer data sharing tools both individually and within their department.

"Consumer tools often lack the security features needed for business use and are difficult for IT to manage centrally. To prevent external leaks of business documents like contracts and invoices, and content production documents like proposals and scripts, we needed a formal data sharing environment in place company-wide," says Yasuda.

Although their existing on-premises file servers were convenient for storing data files, they weren’t built for sharing information flexibly with third parties such as advertising agencies and production companies. In fact, if a staff member wanted to check a document while out on location, they’d even have to ask someone to forward it to them by email. Therefore, the company decided to consider a new data sharing mechanism for its business-oriented cloud storage service to improve operational efficiency and reduce security risks.

Solution: secure File Storage and Sharing

After careful consideration, they went with Dropbox.

A major deciding factor was that, based on the results of their earlier survey, Dropbox was already the most-used cloud service among TV Asahi employees.

"Many of our employees liked how easy the interface is to use, and we felt that rollout would go more smoothly since they could get used to it quickly," explains TV Asahi’s Makoto Miyahara.

They also considered Dropbox security features. Specifically, alongside the multi-factor authentication and advanced log management, the fact that admins can centrally monitor company usage gave them peace of mind.

"Because we can monitor the service at all times, we can also apply governance policies and controls. We thought this would discourage the use of consumer tools and also create a data sharing environment where employees can access files stored in the cloud anytime, anywhere." — Hajime Yasuda

Dropbox can handle large volumes of data with ease, which was another big plus. TV broadcasters work in many areas that handle flies with huge data content, such as video and computer graphics (CG). Before, Asahi TV data stored these on its file servers, but employees had expressed that they found this inconvenient for sharing data externally. "When directors were filming on location, they would ask to look at past footage there and then, but we had almost no way to accommodate their request. But Dropbox allows us to preview most of our files, even when they’re in niche formats like Avid DNxHD and Apple ProRes, which video and CG apps use. And because we can check them without downloading the whole file, we can even do this at sites where internet signal is limited. We looked at the pros and cons of several services, but we felt that Dropbox was our only option for handling video content," says Takatoshi Yamamoto, from TV Asahi’s Corporate Design Center.

Results: expanding Use of Dropbox for Video and Graphics

This led TV Asahi to adopt Dropbox. They’re currently‌ rolling it out throughout the company. Licenses were distributed according to the requirements of each department, starting with the CG and internet business departments who needed them the most. The aim is to make on-site operations and information sharing more efficient. 

"I work in CG production, where we have already begun full-scale use of the system. It’s made communicating with people outside the company much more efficient. As well as the video file preview function we mentioned earlier, Dropbox Transfer also makes it easy to transfer large files to and from external locations. The ability to set download expiration dates flexibly is particularly useful. Dropbox is also an early adopter of the latest tech, so we feel confident that we’ll be able to build a file management and storage environment that keeps up with all the newest developments" — Yamamoto 

Going forward, we also plan to implement Dropbox products that we haven’t taken advantage of yet. Yamamoto cites Dropbox Paper as an example, and shares his ideas for using it as follows: "We’d like to use its Gantt chart feature to monitor project progress. Currently, we upload Excel files for project management, but we expect Dropbox will be more convenient."