Inside Premiere Digital – 30K Shows a Month –Every Corner of the World.
“We deliver their shows to 122 countries in 43 languages, and they go live every Thursday at the same time globally.”
- Geoff Bloder
CTO, Premiere Digital
Breaking the legacy: A transition built for growth
Premiere Digital, a global technology services company, had one problem: a monolithic “portal” holding it back. The move to version 2.0 was long overdue.
Sunsetting the old stack was the only way forward, making way for microservices and an API-first approach to unlock volume the old system couldn’t deliver.
The shift was driven largely by mounting friction. A legacy vendor stuck in the past — long release cycles. Dipping quality. A velocity gap that kept widening as the business scaled faster than the vendor could follow. Something had to give.
The challenge lived in two places: technical and operational. Teams that could ramp up as needed. Onboarding fast, even during high-turnover stretches. That kind of agility keeps delivery on track.
The move to 2.0 changed everything that followed.
Today, Premiere Digital’s platform runs at global pace — delivering 25,000 to 30,000 TV shows every month, across streaming platforms, telcos, airlines, and hotels. Petabytes of data. Millions of files. No compromise on speed or accuracy.
The proof is in the numbers:
120 → 450 employees in 10 years.
3 global offices.
2 acquisitions absorbed along the way.
That’s what happens when your product and your partners are built to stretch without breaking.
Industry
Media
Region
US
“Fix one thing, break two things,” and it never stopped.
Premiere Digital needed a partner. Now.
But outsourcing is not simple when the systems are mission-critical. The stakes go up.
The product called for a microservice-based, API-first approach, since integration would be central to how the platform functioned.
And then, Premiere Digital signed its largest client to date — and the pressure shot up.
Right on cue. COVID-19 hit.
Demand for content delivery spiked overnight. Streaming platforms surged. Steady, predictable volume turned into a constant scramble. They needed a partner who could move just as quickly.
Even with the platform stabilized, a bigger question loomed: how do studios actually understand and monetize the content they own? Premiere Digital needed an AI-driven way to unlock the value buried in massive content libraries.
“The studios that are sitting on, you know, 100 years’ worth of content, we make a joke that at least the movie and TV business went digital 25 years ago, and nobody’s deleted a file since then.” Geoff Bloder
Studios today sit on millions of files, petabytes of data — an asset library worth more than ever. As ad-supported models reshape the industry, one truth stands out: the value isn’t in the subscription. It’s in the content itself. But there’s a problem. Studios don’t actually know what they have.
Libraries are too vast and fragmented for teams to track manually.
Solving that meant going beyond software alone — Premiere Digital had to build an on-premises solution, complete with its own servers and GPUs, running models locally.
Highlights
TV shows/month
Global content distribution
Multilingual reach
Global offices
Eight weeks to three: Brisk delivery, zero compromise
Navtech started small: QA and regression testing on a legacy product, and that was the only scope. Every delivery landed clean, and clean delivery builds trust. Trust compounded into full project ownership. A long-term partnership earned one sprint at a time.
What came next was built with purpose: asset management, title management, order management, billing — all engineered in from day one. Weeks in, Premiere Digital was already testing it, using it, refining it. Live.
Modules that once took six to eight weeks now raced down to three, over time, the trust grew into full project ownership, a long-term partnership earned one sprint at a time.
“And we’re like, well, let’s give them another one and another one and another one. Navtech demonstrated their skills and their ability to work in this space and understand this industry.” Geoff recounts.
Navtech scaled teams up and down on demand, whether it was UI-heavy work, deep Python development for the AI platform, or Java-based workflow orchestration. That gave Premiere Digital the flexibility to move fast without missing a beat.
This agility, paired with Navtech’s speed in onboarding new team members, proved essential during periods of high turnover, keeping delivery on track when it mattered most.
That same flexibility became critical during COVID-19, when demand surged, and business continuity was non-negotiable. Navtech’s ability to ramp quickly and keep operations running smoothly ensured Premiere Digital stayed ahead of the curve, even under pressure.
Deploy big. Deploy fast. Deploy anytime.
Premiere Digital experienced the transformation unfold in real time. Migrating to live Version 2.0 was an existential shift.
Premiere Digital never missed a beat. Disney+, Apple TV+ — the entire industry racing to launch exclusive content at the exact moment COVID-19 paralyzed everyone else. This is where most partnerships break: when timelines compress and everyone else is slowing down. Navtech played a quiet role in that — Premiere Digital stayed on schedule, every time.
AI was next, and it had to be done the hard way: on-premises, on company-owned servers and GPUs, with models running locally, and content fully air-gapped. The result was an AI platform built specifically for media — extending Premiere Digital’s offering without disrupting a single service.
Navtech moved 220 people to secure remote work in days during COVID-19. Applications retooled, networks rebuilt, connectivity reengineered. Delivery never stopped. While other vendors furloughed staff, Premiere Digital’s volume climbed as it built new technology on the fly.
Navtech helped to build the network. Supplied the talent — developers, engineers, QA, DevOps — a full agile pipeline, assembled fast to keep shipping on schedule.