Getting Jim Henson’s Pajanimals on-air on time

Generally, viewing your clients as puppets is no way to run a successful business. But we can make an exception to that rule…

We count among our clients the hugely talented Sixteen South, creators and producers of children’s television programmes.

Among their many award-winning projects was working with the Jim Henson Company to provide the puppetry for Pajanimals, which originally ran between 2010 and 2013.

In that time, Belfast-based Sixteen South produced 52 episodes, each of which had to be transported to Los Angeles to meet tight deadlines on a weekly basis ready to be aired to 250 million homes in the USA on NBC’s Sprout network.

With the digital files for television programmes of this type too large to be transferred across standard broadband, production companies often rely on using next day courier services to transport their content from A to B. That’s obviously a slow and laborious process that takes a big chunk out of the working week, especially when you’re working to tight weekly deadlines. And when A is Belfast and B is Los Angeles, that complicates matters even further.

That’s why we kitted out Sixteen South’s post-production studio with a managed and dedicated fibre connection. The superfast connection is synchronous (which means the upload speed is just as fast as the download speed) and uncontended (which means the connection is just for them and nobody else in the building, street or city can drag the speeds down).

The connection can scale up to 10Gbps (gigabit per second), but 1Gbps is usually plenty to get an episode to America in a matter of minutes.

And it wouldn’t be fair to end a tale of puppets racing against time to get on television on time with the somewhat drier technical details. So, without further ado, here’s La-La-Lullaby by the Pajanimals.