The Jim Henson Company isn't the average business and neither are its technology needs: it's part of the 45 year old multimedia group that created The Muppet Show® and Fraggle Rock®. Today, it continues creating characters and producing TV and film in an industry heavily influenced by recent animation developments. Much of the London team’s work is in post production for the Academy Award-winning Jim Henson’s Creature Shop®, one of the world’s pre-eminent character-led visual effects facilities for the entertainment industry. Like most media firms, The Jim Henson Company is seeing huge growth in data and file sizes: a major business challenge is how to get them where they need to be with maximum ease and at least cost.

Huge files containing still and moving digital images are created and sent to clients in London and to Henson’s other operations in New York and Hollywood, typically sending 300-400 files to a client at a time. Averaging between 6 and 12Mb each, some of the files (particularly for film work) can be up to 200Mb. ADSL broadband was fine for downloading and speed was not an issue. However, because of the huge amounts of data being uploaded to the Internet, some transmissions took up to 12 hours each. Senior systems administrator Peter Guyan explains why The Jim Henson Company needed an SDSL-based alternative.

“We create a huge amount of video and graphics and we’re sending several gigabytes of data each day. With so much uploading, many of our staff had to work through the night so we needed to go beyond ADSL without incurring the cost of a private leased line. ADSL was great for downloading, but our business needed the same speed both ways,” he said.

The answer was BT Business Broadband Advanced. It offers equal speeds for uploading and downloading and is very reliable during long periods of very high network demand. Perfect for a serious broadband business like The Jim Henson Company. With the new service installed, Guyan immediately saw its upload times reduced by 75 per cent. Staff are now back on regular hours and are much fresher from not working so late: morale has been boosted while overtime costs have dropped dramatically.

Guyan added: “Another benefit is, because we’ve cut upload times by so many hours, our production teams also have a longer lead time to turn around client work – something that’s critical in our line of business.”

The Jim Henson Company is BT’s first Business Broadband Advanced customer: they highlight the particular need that the media and marketing industries have for the two-way power and speed of SDSL-based solutions.

The Jim Henson Company www.henson.com