Greek TV Station Goes Tapeless with Omneon MediaGrid

Omneon MediaGrid SKAI Television recently equipped their facility with a 96-TB Omneon Mediagrid active storage system for the archival of daily news material. Producers at the Athens, Greece, television station will now be able to transfer archived clips into their production system with heightened simplicity and speed.

MediaGrid will provide SKAI Television with a central pool of resources including clips, rushes and programming, all at the ready for editors and journalists for immediate repurposing. The MediaGrid system joins an Omneon Spectrum media server system already set up for commercial playout, a keystone in SKAI's tapeless workflow.

"My colleagues and I have proven experience with Omneon equipment — its reliability, flexibility, and robustness," said SKAI Television Technical Director Nick Millas. "Because we expect our operation to grow, we were also interested in the MediaGrid system's easy scalability. The installation itself was incredibly fast and efficient; it was up and running in less than two days."

MediaGrid's speed and simplicity are fundamental design features making it the first storage system with an active role in broadcast workflow. Beyond high-performance shared storage, by processing the content stored inside it, MediaGrid combines multiple independent, intelligent and interconnected servers, merging grid storage and grid computing to decrease load time for its applications and users. Now any operator in the workflow has an easier and faster path to retrieve digital media.

Prior to SKAI Television's implementation of MediaGrid, news content was stored by the broadcaster on XDCAM cartridges. This made an inefficient and time-intensive process out of clip retrieval. Now, SKAI's Blue Order asset management system automatically archives the high-resolution broadcast content from each daily news cycle, as well as select rushes, to MediaGrid following the evening's final news bulletin.

Nearly six months' worth of programming can be stored at one time on Omneon's MediaGrid. Of the 96 TB capacity for mixed-media archiving, about 3 TB of content is dedicated to SKAI Radio.

Relaunched under the PTS Publishing Group on April 1, 2006, SKAI Television became the first non-subscription television station to operate under a completely digital, tapeless workflow broadcasting SD in a 16:9 format. This accomplishment has earned them a reputation as one of the world's most technologically advanced broadcast news operations.

SKAI Television also attracts teams of engineers from across the globe to its Athens facility to observe their SONAPS news production system. They are the first broadcaster after Japan to operate the system.