Avid, TerraBlock Enable Buffalo Bills Video Team

Video production director and engineer Stephen Asposto started his run with the Buffalo Bills at the infancy of video production, when the stadium’s first video scoreboard was installed in 1994. He’s overseen the expansion of the team’s programming from scoreboard entertainment and game-day cutaways into commercial production for sponsors, website video content, and regional broadcasts of Buffalo Bills branded weekly TV shows and network preseason game broadcasts.

Asposto and his team work around the clock across multiple Avid editing stations to turn around programming in time for game-day and television broadcasts. All edit stations are spread throughout the Buffalo Bills’ campus facilities, including the training center, administration building and stadium, which houses the control room.

At the center of the control room is a TerraBlock 24 EX shared storage server that Asposto purchased last season.

“I can say without a doubt, TerraBlock was the right decision for us,” he says. “We needed an affordable storage server that could streamline operations and accelerate turnaround, which TerraBlock has done. It’s proven indispensable; I can’t even imagine how we ever operated without it.”

Prior to TerraBlock, the Buffalo Bills campus housed an extensive tape library that required lengthy, manual searches for files.

“Before TerraBlock, finding and ingesting files was a complete nightmare. Each editor had to digitize NFL footage into their own Avid edit suite before it could be used for any programming,” said Asposto. “We were constantly juggling tapes across the different campus facilities – a time-consuming and cost-prohibitive practice. Now we can log all footage on the control room workstation into TerraBlock, and everyone has immediate access; it’s completely eradicated duplication efforts on media platforms and projects.”

He continued, “The ability to save all of our files, both game-day and licensed NFL footage, on one central server has saved us an entire day’s work just by removing the time it would have taken to shuffle through tapes and ingest files. Rather than going to the library to retrieve a tape, you can just download the footage from our SAN at whichever location you’re working.”

TerraBlock has also enabled the Buffalo Bills video production team to adapt and grow with new technology and formats. 2011 marked the first year the team worked with HD NFL footage because TerraBlock allotted them enough storage space.

“With help from evolving technology like TerraBlock, we’re able to deliver video that we just couldn’t in 1994, in a fraction of the time,” says Asposto. “We can now crank out two or three HD features a week in web content alone, which never would have been possible if the footage wasn’t readily available on the TerraBlock like it is now.”