Lithuania’s Largest Private TV Network Upgrades to Front Porch Digital Storage

Lithuanian broadcaster LNK is upgrading to Front Porch Digital’s DIVArchive CSM and DIVAdirector media asset management (MAM) systems. DIVArchive drives the file-based workflow for LNK, Lithuania’s largest private television network, and the upgrade will allow LNK to take advantage of more efficient storage technology for little added cost.

Upgrades to DIVAdirector, the only MAM system the broadcaster uses, will accommodate more users and add functionality.

“Several years ago when we looked at the possibilities for an archiving and MAM system, Front Porch Digital was the only real contender because it was a mature, stable system backed by experienced engineers,” said Vilius Šumskas, IT manager at LNK. “Over time the DIVA systems empowered us to add three additional channels at almost no technical human resources cost. Now that we need a cost-effective way to increase our storage capacity, upgrading DIVArchive was a no-brainer. We were also impressed with the new version of DIVAdirector. Because we use it so intensely, we knew that we would really benefit from the latest design and capabilities.”

LNK has been using DIVArchive and DIVAdirector since 2008. LNK is upgrading to DIVArchive version 7.1 to coincide with its transition from LTO-4 to LTO-6 technology, a move that will give it three times the archive capacity without considerable hardware expansion costs. DIVArchive 7.1 will not only allow LNK to use LTO-6 as a storage medium, but it will also perform completely automated migration from LTO-4 to LTO-6.

At the same time, LNK is in the midst of its third upgrade to DIVAdirector, this time to version 5.2. Front Porch Digital adds new features regularly, and over the years LNK has taken advantage of several of them, such as proxy video control using a USB shuffle device, Smooth Streaming, a Web interface that works on more platforms, and more granular user-rights control. With version 5.2, Front Porch Digital moved its database engine to a more modern object-relational database — PostgreSQL — which LNK expects will make its searches in DIVAdirector even faster.

DIVArchive and DIVAdirector have been especially helpful for LNK’s “long-term project” news. LNK’s two news services prepare three separate half-hour live evening news events on two channels and one four-hour live news event on the Info TV news channel. Each day 30 journalists use DIVAdirector to search a database of 80,000 clips. At the same time, DIVArchive prioritizes file retrieval according to hot material, which needs to be on-air within 15 minutes, and less important material that won’t be used for a couple of hours.

“By effectively enforcing media content storage rules and retention policies in our news workflow and others, DIVArchive helps us save significantly on storage hardware and provides stability that has surpassed all expectations. In addition, we save thousands of work hours because a good portion of our workflow is automated,” Šumskas said. “And because DIVAdirector is Web-based, content is accessible from almost every computer in the building on every major browser on both PC and Mac.”

“LNK reaches 98 percent of the Lithuanian audience, making it an invaluable source of news and entertainment in that country,” said Rino Petricola, senior vice president and general manager at Front Porch Digital. “Our DIVArchive and DIVAdirector systems help LNK overcome the challenges of managing and accessing a massive amount of content within multiple complex workflows so that they can operate with maximum efficiency.”