Broadcasters teach lessons on digital storage

By Rodney Appleyard at the ABE 2004 Exhibition

The Australian Broadcast Exhibition is this week showcasing some of the most advanced and sophisticated technology used by high profile TV channels around the world for storing and managing digital assets.

Many of the companies on show are intending to make their technology available to enterprises big and small, such as government departments, education establishments, defence organisations and security firms.

Hardware devices and software programs have been designed specifically by these companies to deal with the storage, control and delivery of audio and video material.

Michael Coop, the system design engineer and creator of a software program called mediaproxy, talked about the prospect of his solution being used outside of the broadcast arena.

Coop started his Australian based company - also called mediaproxy - two years ago, and is now expecting it to heal many problems faced by different industries. mediaproxy is used by Channel 10 at the moment and Channel 7 has put in order for it too.

It has the ability to store at least a year's supply of TV programmes made by these channels so that any section of a programme can be called instantly via a Web browser. It is specifically designed to meet television compliance needs too, which could be adapted to meet the compliance needs of other industries too.

"We have had discussions with the Australian Parliament House for its use in the parliamentary library," said Coop. "When the parliament members are in session they like to know what has been said on the news in their home constituencies.

"We aim to have a server recording all of the news and so that we make the media available for parliamentarians to watch these programmes. Education is another area we are aiming to go into. One of our potential customers has a very close relationship with media studies in universities and they want to expose their news archives to media studies students.

"We can make the files read-only, so that the students can watch the news and analyse it the next day. We are intending to go into security at a high level too. For example, we can provide long term recordings of footage from the last year in a foyer, so that staff can retrieve clips taken in banks and airports, for instance, needed to catch thieves and terrorists."

Avid have also created its own hardware specifically designed to store digital assets, because it found that all of the other storage vendors in the market could not maintain the quality of this media or cope with multiple users.

Strajer Conigilio, the broadcast manager for Avid, said: "The Department of Defence uses our Avid systems extensively, but they do not provide a lot of information on how it uses our technology, as you can imagine.

"But our Avid Unity Media Network allows for shared storage. We looked at all the different SAN solutions on the market, and none of them gave us the performance we needed for real-time video sharing. The SANs were all made for big transaction sharing, not for high-resolution video and so did not have the bandwidth.

"So we then invested in building up our own network SAN solution, particularly for guaranteed performance in high resolution editing environments."

Other broadcast storage solutions which could be applied to other enterprise industries includes the MediaStream Server, provided by Techtel, which is a storage system based on a Unix operating system, specifically designed for containing digital media. It is a neat box for containing immediate storage

It is connected to MassStor software, also provided by Techtel, which is used to retrieve and manage huge volumes of digital assets stored in remote areas.

Ardendo also provides another digital asset management system, named Ardome, currently used by CNN in America, as well as ABC and Foxtel in Australia. This retrieves data held on a Sony petasite hard drive.

This exhibition revealed that there are plenty of ready made, tried and tested hardware and software solutions available to manage large volumes of media assets. This could be a welcome relieve for enterprises who are looking for more sophisticated ways of managing their digital information.

Photos from ABE 2004

Michael Coop and Peter Swienteck, from mediaproxy
The mediaproxy software
Straker Coniglio, with the Avid storage system
Mal Chandler with Techtel's MediaStream Server
Close-up of the MediaStream Server
Techtel's MassStore softwareArdendo's Ardome DAM softwareArdeno's Sony storage stackPeople at exhibitionTV camera at exhibitionTV mixing desk at exhibition

Click here if you would like to register for this event, which is running until August 5th at The Manly Pacific Hotel.

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