Customer Story
How Overtime scaled to 4 petabytes of content while cutting costs by $130K
Overtime's approach to sports media is anything but typical. With over 115 million followers across social platforms and multiple sports leagues in the company’s portfolio, they've disrupted not only the way fans view and interact with game footage, but how players grow their careers as athlete-creators. The company owns and operates OTE (Overtime Elite) and Overtime Select in basketball, OT7 in football, and OTX in boxing, all while producing over 150 pieces of original content weekly.
Their infrastructure had to scale to keep pace. When they reached nearly 4PB of assets across multiple offices and platforms, they knew they needed to stop shipping drives and relying on on-prem options and move to a centralized, cloud-based asset management system.
Overtime's Head of Operations and Technology, Dmitriy Nabedrik, recently sat down with Backlight's Jon Foster to discuss their revamped media operations and how Iconik keeps pace with their rapid growth. This is a condensed version of that conversation.
When Dmitriy Nabedrik joined Overtime in early 2022, the company was experiencing incredible growth. The launch of Overtime Elite in 2021 had generated close to 100 terabytes of content in its first year alone—a turning point for the organization's tech infrastructure.
"When I came into Overtime, we had close to four petabytes of content spread across various cloud storage tools, and we had a massive on-prem storage footprint, both in our New York office and at the arena in Atlanta," Nabedrik explained.
The distributed nature of Overtime's storage was creating both technical and financial headaches. The company was experiencing a 10% month-over-month increase in cloud storage costs. When they needed to expand their on-prem storage at the arena by 160TB, the price tag came in at $70,000.
"That's when we quickly realized that we don't want to keep growing our on-prem storage," Nabedrik said. "We need to think about a cloud-centric solution."
But simply uploading everything to the cloud wasn't the answer. "We didn't want to just blindly upload our content into the cloud for safekeeping. It was going to run up our cloud storage costs, and it made it very difficult for us to reference our growing library," Dimitriy noted.
Beyond storage costs, Overtime was spending approximately $20,000 annually just shipping drives between locations. "Every shooter would create two drives. They would ship one drive and they would travel with the other drive back to their home base," Dimitriy explained. This redundancy was necessary for safety, but it created significant delays and compounded the storage problem.
The collaboration challenges were equally frustrating. "Editors and producers were basically putting together documents with time codes, handwritten and sending these notes back and forth," Dimitriy recalled. "A ton of time spent just editing and getting feedback on just one edit." For a company producing 150 pieces of content weekly, these inefficiencies were adding up to significant productivity losses.
The tipping point came during a production IT sync meeting. "We left that conversation recognizing the need for a better and less expensive, more user-friendly media management experience," Dimitriy said. The goals for implementation were clear: migrate all their data without disrupting daily operations.
After evaluating multiple options, Overtime partnered with AWS and Slalom consulting. One of the most valuable early decisions was cleaning up their data before migration—reducing their dataset from 4PB to 3PB through de-duping, which saved on both egress costs and future storage expenses.
The technical execution involved using Resilio combined with AWS EC2 instances. Moving that volume of data took about a month and a half. Once the content landed in S3 buckets, Overtime deployed 15 Iconik Storage Gateways (ISGs) that began processing and ingesting everything, generating web proxies for their entire library.
"We had web proxies generated of all of our content, which made it super easy to watch down any bit of content that we've migrated, which is something we didn't really have access to before," Dimitriy said.
What set Iconik apart was its storage-agnostic approach. "It doesn't matter whether you're on-prem or in the cloud, the source of the files doesn't really matter," Dimitriy noted. "That's not something that was possible before we rolled out Iconik."
Users no longer needed to remember where files were stored or navigate different systems. The review and approval capabilities brought immediate workflow improvements. "As soon as the export goes up into Iconik, the producer can get a link sent to them. They log in, they log comments that are time-based, and then the editor logs right back in," Dimitriy explained. The Adobe Premiere integration meant editors could review comments directly in their workflow.
Automated workflows for storage tiering became another critical feature. Overtime implemented automations that automatically moved unused assets to lower-cost storage tiers—a major driver of their cost savings.
In the first year alone, Overtime saved approximately $130,000 in storage costs. "That is honestly thanks to the different workflows that Iconik has built into itself," Dimitriy said. "We're able to move files between a regular S3 bucket and Glacier fairly quickly, call up files that we need to edit with again, or archive footage that we know we're not going to need."
The $20,000 in annual shipping costs was also eliminated as remote workflows became cloud-based. The combination meant the upfront investment paid for itself remarkably quickly.
The old process of shipping drives meant waiting days before footage could be accessed. With cloud-based workflows, that timeline has been reduced to hours—and they're working to push it down to minutes.
Overtime is now using Suite, a file acceleration tool, to speed up remote uploads. "It looks like a mounted hard drive on your computer, except those files live in the cloud," Dimitriy explained. A dedicated ISG monitors the Suite drive, so when shooters drop files into Suite, web proxies are generated and teams can start working within hours instead of days.
They're also exploring edit proxy workflows that would upload proxies first from remote shoots, potentially reducing the window to minutes. Operationally, Dimitriy noted he's stopped worrying about backend processes. "Iconik Storage Gateway just handles all of that for us."
Overtime is focused on three main expansion areas. First is AI-powered metadata enrichment to automate metadata creation for archive content while enriching new content as it's ingested. Second, they're expanding their use of Iconik's automation engine for increasingly sophisticated workflows. Third, they want to integrate distribution channels directly into the platform, creating an end-to-end workflow from capture through production to distribution.
Overtime's experience offers valuable lessons for media organizations facing similar challenges:
For organizations struggling with exponential content growth, distributed teams, rising storage costs, or fragmented workflows, Overtime's journey demonstrates that the right media asset management platform can deliver transformative results.
To watch the full conversation on-demand, click here.
Want to see Overtime's content? Find them on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Snapchat at @overtime, with league-specific content at Overtime Season (football), OTX or Overtime Boxing, and Overtime Select (basketball).
Interested in learning how Iconik can transform your media workflows? Book a demo to discuss your specific challenges and explore how a unified, cloud-centric media management platform could help your organization scale efficiently.