Seagate providing Half A Million GB Of Storage to support NBC in Beijing

The SeagateBarracuda ES Series has
been selected as the hard drive of choice for the Omneon MediaDeck media
servers and MediaGrid active storage systems that will enable NBC’s coverage of
the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The media servers and storage systems will allow NBC
to produce an unprecedented 3,600 hours of coverage during the Beijing Olympic
Games, a three-fold increase over the coverage during the 2004 Athens Olympic
Games.

Picture this: A gymnast leaps onto
the balance beam. By the time she makes a dismount, NBC’s broadcast footage has
already been stored on the Seagate Barracuda ES hard drive in Omneon’s Beijing
MediaGrid active storage system, traveled 6,350 miles to the New York MediaGrid
active storage system, processed, and quickly transmitted as compelling
coverage on television and www.nbcolympics.com.

The innovative workflow begins in China
with 20 MediaDeck servers, powered by the Barracuda ES hard drives, which are
used to digitize and ingest HD feeds. Each MediaDeck server contains both
high-resolution and low-resolution codecs to simultaneously create both
full-resolution IMX or XDCAM HD files and low-resolution proxy files of all
recordings. The resulting files are actively transferred, while still being
recorded, to the MediaGrid active storage system. Then, using Omneon’s ProCast
CDN™ content distribution system, the proxies are transferred thousands of
miles from the MediaGrid active storage system in Beijing to a second MediaGrid
storage system in New York, again powered by Seagate Barracuda ES hard drives,
where producers can browse, view, and edit the files.

“NBC needs to capture every second
of every competition at multiple venues in China,
quickly turning them into dynamic programming for television and Internet
broadcasting – nothing can fall through the cracks,” said Bill Schilling,
marketing director at Seagate. “We welcomed the opportunity to work with Omneon
to support NBC for its Olympics coverage. Omneon is the market leader for
developing storage solutions for broadcast video, which is becoming more
prevalent via the Web, especially for hugely popular sporting events like the
Olympics.”

“Because the workflow must be
seamless and the nature of the programming is so significant, we decided to use
Seagate’s enterprise hard drives, which are the best fit for our needs in terms
of reliability, best-in-class design and unrivaled performance,” said Geoff
Stedman, SVP products and markets at Omneon.

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