“ODMedia is a very professional company and a pleasure to do business with. They always deliver on their promises, go out of their way to help and think along with your ideas gladly. Thanks to ODMedia, we are able to make our content available to our customers in the best possible way, all over the globe.”

Services

‘The Smurfs’ is an animation series inspired by the comic books from Peyo, a Belgian comics artist. The little blue characters were published for the first time in 1958. Animation studio Hanna-Barbera created the highly successful animation series between 1981 and 1989, which includes 272 episodes of 23 minutes each and has been translated into over 40 different languages.

IMPS, the rights owner of the ‘The Smurfs’ brand, also handles the worldwide distribution for the series and had all episodes in SD on tape. ODMedia digitized all tapes, upscaled them from SD to HD and took care of the complete digital distribution in all languages. Expoza, part of the ODMedia group, created a successful strategy for the series on YouTube, the biggest online video platform in the world.

ODMedia ingested around 5000 tapes and made an inventory of intros, outros, tunes, title boards and end credits. We digitally cleaned all episodes and synchronized each different language version with the new digital sequence. We remastered all episodes and performed a SD to HD upscaling and 4:3 – 16:9 manual pan and scan. Once this project was finished, all episodes were archived at ODMedia and ready for digital distribution.

We first developed a screening portal for ‘The Smurfs’, so potential customers could review the available content. After that, we handled the worldwide on-spec delivery to IPTV/Cable operators and broadcasters such as Canal+, Telecom Italia, Ceska Televize, Turner, Disney, FOX and many others.

Expoza scanned YouTube on all illegal uploads of ‘The Smurfs’ and handled the claiming, monetizing and conflict handling. Next to that, Expoza built 41 Smurfs channels, one for each language. Expoza created an endboard for each video to drive traffic to the website and has built a huge subscriber base on all channels. Expoza analyses the traffic and data thoroughly to keep optimizing the channels.