Russian Media Corp. Relies on Front Porch Digital for Migration, Storage

The All-Russian State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (VGTRK) has purchased seven SAMMAsolo tape-migration units and one DIVArchive CSM system with unlimited storage capacity from Front Porch Digital for its new datacenter in Moscow.

As Russia’s largest media corporation and operator of Russian information agency RIA Novosti, VGTRK will use the SAMMAsolo units for mass migration and digitization of videotapes from its media archives, and DIVArchive for file-based storage.

“VGTRK has a number of legacy materials and a very low rate of repurposing — a situation it wanted to rectify,” said Mike Kalanchekaev, head of the broadcast IT division at Okno TV, the Moscow distributor that handled the sale, system integration, and support. “VGTRK wanted not only to preserve its assets efficiently, but also to make the materials more accessible to more people so that they can be more easily found and reused. The SAMMA and DIVA products make that possible.”

With the Front Porch Digital products in place, VGTRK can avoid physically moving videotapes across its various facilities, which saves transport expenses and speeds up VGTRK’s workflow.

VGTRK chose SAMMAsolo for ingest because, unlike regular video-server solutions, the units satisfied requirements for real-time quality control, simultaneous multiformat ingest, and optimal migration-workflow tools. Both the SAMMAsolo units and the DIVArchive system integrate seamlessly with VGTRK’s existing workflow and media asset manager. Users access the DIVArchive site from any VGTRK corporate location in Moscow and around Russia via VGTRK’s private distributed-IP network, which means VGTRK can allow more people than ever before to access the archive.

“This is one of our largest installations in Russia and is a perfect example of how our products were designed not only to work together, but with other systems as well,” said Rino Petricola, SVP and managing director of Front Porch Digital International. “VGTRK’s system combines both SAMMA and DIVArchive within the same integrated workflow, which will improve their process across all of their stations.”

SAMMAsolo is a single-stream migration solution that supports a wide variety of video tape formats on input, and then delivers multiple digital files in flight simultaneously, with frame-accurate lossless preservation quality, broadcast quality mezzanine, and proxy. SAMMA can produce up to five different simultaneous digital output files in real time in a wealth of formats. SAMMAsolo is founded on a scalable, modular architecture allowing up to eight SAMMAsolo systems to be controlled simultaneously by one operator using a centralized control interface, thus allowing the network to grow organically to meet demand.

DIVArchive is Front Porch Digital’s CSM system, the software layer that connects storage to video applications and equipment. The latest version, DIVArchive V7.0, supports complex DPX packages and enables video-like operations on film-carried content, making the solution desirable for film production and postproduction applications. The system is the first of its kind to implement the new open Archive eXchange Format (AXF) technology developed by Front Porch Digital to protect, preserve, and facilitate the exchange of content among storage systems, today and for the future. DIVArchive V7.0 has the unique ability to interconnect every element of operations from archive to production to transmission.