NCPB Taps Omneon for End-to-End Workflow

Northern California Public Broadcasting (NCPB), the country’s most-watched public television broadcaster, has purchased Omneon video infrastructure to support the end-to-end file-based workflow at its San Francisco facilities. The tightly integrated media-processing and storage systems from Omneon will replace Pinnacle server systems and a legacy archive system, providing improved media management and processing while enabling a more efficient workflow in delivering content to air and to other distribution platforms.

“In selecting a new server and storage vendor, we undertook an intense eight-month evaluation process, and the Omneon systems stood out from competing companies with their ability to demonstrate a complete workflow,” says Lee Young, director of engineering facilities at NCPB. “We’ll be implementing systems and applications from across the Omneon product line, taking advantage of their high level of integration — and compatibility with third-party systems — to streamline the entire production and broadcast workflow.”

Two mirrored Omneon Spectrum media server systems will support broadcast ingest, storage, and playout, and a third Spectrum system will support ingest for NCPB production. A 144-TB Omneon MediaGrid active storage system will provide centralized storage for the installation and provide nearline storage for Apple and Avid editors within NCPB post-production as well as archival media storage. The Omneon Media Application Server (MAS), including the ProXplore, ProBrowse, and ProXchange applications, will facilitate clip management across the server and storage systems, allow desktop viewing of any stored content across the Omneon platform, and perform accelerated transcoding of media as needed throughout the workflow. The Omneon video infrastructure will support 11 broadcast channels.

“In supporting the full production and broadcast workflow at NCPB, the Omneon video-file-based infrastructure will bring much-improved efficiency to critical processes such as multiclient editing, studio production, integrated channel playout, and multiformat distribution,” says Geoff Stedman, SVP of marketing and business development at Omneon. “As broadcasters strive to make the most of their content production and distribution efforts, Omneon systems offer flexible, powerful, and cost-effective solutions that allow facilities to do more with less.”