NBA Doubles Digital Archiving Effort With SGI

The NBA has produced an awful lot of higlights in its day, and a multiyear extension of its relationship with storage solutions provider SGI to double its historical digital archiving effort by ingesting 60,000 hours of video content each year.

Eventually the entire history of the NBA archive, which contains more than 400,000 hours of content dating back to 1946, will be digitized

After successfully unveiling the NBA Digital Media Management System with Sunnyvale, Calif.-based SGI during the 2006-07 NBA season, the first-of-its-kind system in professional sports enabled the league to simultaneously ingest and archive footage from up to 14 NBA games, edit the archival content on the fly, provide full game broadcasts, clips and other NBA content to 214 countries worldwide.

“Continuing to work with SGI on the expansion of the NBA Digital Media Management System ensures the digital preservation of the entire history of the NBA,” said Mike Rokosa, vice president of engineering for the NBA. “Additionally, with this groundbreaking digital system, we can easily develop, store and retrieve NBA content for our media and business partners around the world and distribute it on a variety of platforms.”

The NBA Digital Media Management System allows the NBA and all 30 teams to access content from any workstation without having to copy files onto local desktops. By utilizing the SGI InfiniteStorage Data Migration Facility (DMF), the league is more efficient as the system automatically maintains the more frequently requested content on faster spinning disk arrays, while placing rarely needed content to more economical storage.