GOL HD Football Channel Taps Avid DNxHD, Tedial

At the start of the 2008–2009 football season, MediaPro in Spain is
launching a new channel called GOL, the first digital television
service produced entirely in high definition and dedicated exclusively
to football. Central to its operation is a complete process and media
management solution from Tedial.

The architecture of GOL uses a multi-channel EVS server. The whole
workflow is controlled by Tedial modular software products, including
the Tarsys digital archive, content production process control using
Ficus, browse resolution servers using Indexer, and overall system
integration from the Tedial Media Process Manager (MPM).

This is the first tapeless system where all content, from beginning to
end, is stored in Avid DNxHD format for maximum quality. Tedial Indexer
software provides a direct transcode, at faster than real time, into
WMV format for the browse proxy copies immediately upon ingest. Indexer
also generates storyboards automatically and manages the indexing.

Another important part of the structure is the Tedial AST hierarchical
storage manager. Its distributed architecture and dynamic load
balancing ensures that content is continually and widely available to
the many simultaneous users, while also controlling the archiving
process onto data tapes.

The traffic system uses a simple Web interface to set up the recording
of sports events, which is then managed by Tedial Ficus in conjunction
with the Tedial Tarsys archive. The relevant metadata is exported to
the EVS server in advance of the recording. Once it is complete a log
sheet with the event timing and other metadata, including graphics, is
returned for cataloguing in the Tarsys multimedia library.

“On a typical match day we have many games happening at the same time,
and our viewers expect high production values and good content
illustrating the debates around the games,” said Israel Esteban,,
technical director of UNITECNIC, the engineering company of GOL. “We
needed a system that could handle a huge amount of HD content, process
it very quickly, and make it available to a lot of users. It has to be
reliable, and it has to be simple and fast to use. Tedial has built us
a system that does just that.”

“The GOL project was a tremendous opportunity for us,” said Emilio
Lopez Zapata, CTO of Tedial. “We could use all our tools to build a
complete workflow, managing very many processes all of which were
mission critical to the channel. At the same time, we brought our
technical expertise into the project, as we were the first to manage,
archive and transcode DNxHD.

“Quality is always extremely important to us, so we developed all the
algorithms to handle and transcode DNxHD ourselves, as well as
developing all the processes, including direct editing on the server
for speed, proxy editing and partial recovery from data tape,” he added.