Turner Sports Central shortlisted for IBC2012 Innovation Award

Turner Sports Central has been shortlisted in the content management category of the IBC2012 Innovation Awards for its new, multi-sport media asset management (MAM) system, which logs, tracks and retrieves more than 27,000 live recording hours of content from more than 6000 individual events each year — a total of about 2 million highlights captured each year.

Dalet is providing the managerial MAM core for the new system with the Dalet Enterprise Edition MAM platform, which unifies workflow and metadata management across several different systems.

Turner Sports operates its Atlanta Sports Central production center 365 days a year to support its coverage of more than 40 different sports and five national sports leagues, including the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the National Basketball Association (NBA), Major League Baseball (MLB), the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) and the Professional Golfers Association of America (PGA), providing content that is used to feed live broadcasts, web sites, mobile services, multimedia platforms and on-demand services in support of these partner leagues.

Dalet worked with Turner and multiple vendors to create a cohesive, streamlined workflow at Turner Sports Center with integrations that included the in-house “Feeds Request 24/7” system for scheduled recordings, EVS servers for centralized ingest and broadcast playout, Stainless Code for event logging, Apple Final Cut Pro for craft editing and Active Storage, Quantum and NetApp for storage. The scale of the project is huge, with a database that references 3000 teams and 30,000 players, but the effort was accomplished from the specification stage through development and launch in only 15 months. Despite the huge throughput of the system — it is currently configured for 26 ingest and 16 playout channels — any content is available for logging, editing and viewing within 10 seconds.

While live broadcasts are in progress, Dalet is involved with multiple tasks that are simultaneously underway in the production center. Dalet initiates recordings to the SAN and immediately indexes these assets in Dalet, making them available to everyone who needs them, including Dalet users, loggers, craft editors and EVS operators.

This project represents the first deployment of the Dalet MAM-EVS integration, which was announced last year. This integration allows the fluid exchange of content between systems.

See Dalet at IBC2012 Stand 8.B77.