Standing in a gallery of the Rijksmuseum, one can’t help but admire the orchestration behind every wall of art. Each piece has been deliberately chosen and arranged to tell a story, guiding the visitor’s attention, setting a mood, and revealing meaning through contrast and connection.

Behind that choreography lies strategy. The curator doesn’t merely decide what to display; they decide what to acquire, what to withhold, and how to bring the collection to life. In many ways, today’s media organizations face a remarkably similar challenge. They, too, must curate from abundance, selecting, sequencing, and repackaging vast catalogues of content to create engagement and meaning in an age of infinite choice.

Strategic Curation: Building the Collection
Every museum begins with a vision of what it wants to represent. Decisions about which artists, eras, or styles to feature define its identity. In the same way, media organizations determine what kinds of stories they want to tell, which genres to invest in, and what tone or territory defines their brand. This is strategic curation, or the long-term view that shapes what gets commissioned, acquired, or retired. It’s a portfolio decision informed by both creativity and evidence.

The best curators, in art or in media, look beyond “doing more of what works.” They think about differentiation, the gaps in the landscape, and the opportunities to surprise. Choosing a Van Gogh for a museum next to the Van Gogh Museum, for instance, might not add much value. But acquiring a surrealist work by René Magritte could reframe the collection and intrigue visitors in new ways.

Content strategists can apply the same thinking. Research from Deloitte’s 2024 Digital Media Trends found that 57% of global audiences prioritize a variety of content when choosing a platform. A strong brand doesn’t come from sameness, it’s built by intentional contrast and discovery.

Designing the Exhibition
If strategic curation decides what’s in the vault, tactical curation determines what’s on display. Museums regularly reimagine their existing collections into new exhibitions, revealing fresh connections between familiar works. The same is true for streaming and broadcast media. With vast libraries already in hand, the low-hanging fruit is not always producing more, but revealing better.

Repurposing existing titles into themed collections, nostalgia moments, or cultural spotlights can reignite audience engagement. The challenge lies in discovery. Both curators and media planners can only find what they know to look for. Traditional catalogue search surfaces what’s already top of mind, but misses the hidden gems.

That’s where semantic discovery comes in: systems that detect relationships across themes, tones, and metadata to reveal forgotten works - the equivalent of unearthing a “Salvador Dalí in the basement.” Nielsen’s 2024 State of Play report notes that over 40% of all streaming time still goes to library content, not premieres. The opportunity isn’t only in producing the next big hit, it’s in rediscovering the masterpieces already owned.

Curating the Experience
Curation doesn’t end with selection; it extends into experience design. In a museum, the curator determines the order of exhibits, the pacing, and even the lighting, all subtle cues that shape emotion and attention. In media, this translates to the design of the viewer journey: the sequence of shows, the layout of channels, and the rhythm between ad breaks, promotions, and interstitials.

Netflix’s personalization research has shown that optimized ordering of recommendations can increase viewing engagement by up to 20% (Netflix Tech Blog). Context transforms perception. A film placed after a complementary documentary can feel newly relevant; a show introduced through the right preview image can suddenly find its audience. The same piece can tell a different story depending on what surrounds it.

Personalization and the New Gallery Map
Museums increasingly design multiple visitor routes or guided tours for children, deep-dive tracks for art historians, or sensory experiences for casual visitors. Media experiences are following suit. Personalization allows every viewer to navigate their own “exhibit,” surfacing what feels most relevant to them while maintaining a sense of coherence.

A McKinsey study on personalization in media found that personalized recommendations can lift engagement metrics by up to 40%. Yet personalization without purpose risks chaos like an algorithmic gallery with no story. The balance lies in connecting data-driven adaptability with curatorial intent: the art of guiding, not overwhelming.

The Flywheel of Curation
In both art and media, curation runs at two speeds. The strategic flywheel turns slowly, defining long-term direction, budgets, and acquisitions. Attached to it are smaller, faster cogwheels of tactical curation such as daily programming, playlist rotation, and real-time scheduling. When these gears are synchronized, the system becomes self-optimizing.

Audience data continuously feeds insights back into strategy, informing what to commission next and how to evolve the catalogue. According to Accenture’s Future of Broadcast and Streaming 2025, integrating real-time analytics into planning can reduce underperforming content investment by 15–25%. The alignment of strategic vision and tactical agility is what allows a content ecosystem to evolve dynamically, responding to audience behavior without losing its artistic compass.

The Art and Science of Meaning
Ultimately, curation, whether on a gallery wall or a streaming grid, is the act of shaping meaning from abundance. Data alone can’t decide what matters. Algorithms may reveal patterns, but it takes human imagination to turn those patterns into stories that resonate.

The future belongs to those who blend the curator’s eye with the data scientist’s lens and those who treat catalogues not as static warehouses but as living galleries that evolve with every visitor. Whether it’s a painting, a documentary, or a short-form clip, the question is always the same: How do you make someone care enough to stay for one more room, one more episode, one more story?

WALNUT CREEK, Calif.—XenData today announced availability of its X100 active archive for management of one or more enterprise-class LTO or Optical Disc Archive (ODA) libraries that can be scaled to hundreds of petabytes in a configuration based on a Windows Server 2022 cluster with no single point of failure.

The X100 supports robotic libraries from HPE, IBM, Oracle, Qualstar, Quantum, Sony and Spectra Logic. It is well-suited for creative video, medical imaging, video surveillance and other applications with high volumes of large files, the company said.

XenData Archive Series software powers the X100. The latest version of the XenData software is optimized for high-performance servers with multiple Xeon processors, it said.

The archive system includes a fully redundant RAID from Infortrend. The RAID is used as a cache for all files written to the archive and is available with a capacity up to 280TB.

The solution writes LTO cartridges using LTFS and writes to ODA cartridges using the Sony interchange standard. It fully supports the Microsoft security model based on Active Directory, making it easy to install in an existing Windows domain, the company said.

Functions include automatic LTO cartridge replication, file version control, automatic migration of files to the latest generation of LTO or ODA and management of an unlimited number of external cartridges, it said.

When used with two LTO libraries, the system may be configured to mirror archived content across the libraries. This provides strong data protection which goes well beyond a simple backup file repository as file restores are load balanced between the two libraries, it said.

The X100 is available with three interfaces that can be used at the same time, including the file-folder interface, object storage interface and XML API.

Multiple X100 systems can be synchronized using XenData’s Multi-Site Sync service, which links multiple archives in different locations, creating a single global file system accessible from anywhere. As soon as a file is archived to LTO or ODA at one location, it becomes available as a stub file within the global file system.

When a user makes a change by writing, overwriting or deleting a file, that change is propagated to all locations. This provides a consistent up-to-date set of files across the entire distributed organization, it said.

More information is available on the company’s website. 

Ongoing technological advances and changes to operational environments mean that most M&E organizations have or will consider moving some or all or their on-prem content to private or public cloud storage. This involves a deep dive into the cost, features, integration, performance and time drivers that vary for every business. To start, let’s examine different types of deployment.

Public Cloud only—immediately attractive for start-ups and green-field deployments; responsive performance and distribution.  

Private Cloud only—typically attractive to enterprises who generate high volumes of content and who are able to build appropriately-scaled private storage. 

Public + Private Cloud—private for control, public for burst processing. Also attractive for disaster recovery and integration with external partners.

Hybrid Public/On-prem—offers a phased evolution to cloud. Hybrid is required (at least temporarily) if uninterrupted access to data is required during migration.

Multicloud hybrid—Allows content to be managed in the most cost-effective tier via intelligent storage management.

The suitability of each of these deployment models depends on the type of content you have and your specific business model. A deeper dive is required to make an appropriate choice.

CONSIDERATIONS

Cost and performance modelling goes far beyond the simple cost per month to store a TB of content. Content normalization, asset and metadata storage, deduplication, consolidation, proxies, AI analysis and metadata services should all be considered. And of course, cloud ingress and egress costs.

How much content and storage do you have?

Determine how many assets you currently have on premise and their specific file sizes.  Count the amount of tapes and the capacity of each (not each will be full but it’s a useful guideline). Don’t forget tapes on shelves or in stores.

Can you deduplicate?

Migrating only unique content reduces cost and increases speed. If done in advance it will allow better planning of capacity and cost of cloud storage. You can dedupe on file name/size, or more accurately by comparing file size and hash. 

Hardware and networks

Estimate available LTO drives and their versions. Do you have enough drives of each version to manage the migration and service day-to-day operations? You’ll also need the average time each day that a drive is available for migration duties; this may be surprisingly low.

Available bandwidth to the cloud

How much bandwidth can you get? How much can you afford? It may be faster to physically ship a NAS to a cloud provider; often, however, low availability of LTO drives means that writing to NAS is no faster than moving data over the internet.

There are some solutions to limited LTO bandwidth:

• Stop end-users driving the system. Not an option for sites continuing to send content to tape daily. 
• Rent or buy additional LTO drives. Keep tape/drive compatibility in mind as you add drives.
• Rent or buy a small LTO library and drives, and manually shuffle tapes through it. 
• Run migration processes at a lower priority than critical operations. This means that the migration generally takes longer. 

COST AND PERFORMANCE MODELLING OF PUBLIC CLOUDS

As well as the amount of content you wish to migrate to the cloud and any optional processes, you’ll also need to calculate your monthly data ingress and egress rates.

Performance models should consider the number and size of files, number of tapes, transfer speed of LTO drives, tape handling, drive availability, network bandwidth, efficiency of network object transfer processes (eg S3) and optional processes (e.g. acceleration).

Pricing models will take into account performance, storage costs and egress costs, network costs and potential hardware rental costs. Different models are required for different speeds and complexity of migrations, and developing iterations of performance and price models is important.

INTELLIGENT STORAGE MANAGEMENT

To manage migration and ongoing storage, a more sophisticated tool than the typical HSM is required to provide a seamless bridge for all integrated systems to access content during and after the migration both on-prem and in the cloud.

Intelligent Storage Management platforms (e.g. Kumulate) go beyond simple management of multiple tape and disk storage. They administer large amounts of content and metadata within a single name space and orchestrate the services and workflows through which it progresses. They manage conditional workflows and wrap, re-wrap, transcode and publish as required. This not only efficiently manages multiple storage locations and buffers MAMs, PAMs and distribution systems from storage complexity, but crucially protects content integrity over time.

ISMS AND POST-MIGRATION DATA INDEPENDENCE

Post-migration, the ISM continues to provide uninterrupted and transparent access to the content. To the user, operation continues as normal, and MAMs, PAMs or other systems can interact with normalized content and metadata without knowledge of storage, formats or wrappers. 

DATA INTEGRITY AND EVOLUTION MANAGEMENT

Each time content is moved the potential for data corruption increases. Kumulate and other ISMs regularly check the integrity of files in all cloud object stores against hashes independently stored in the ISM. This ensures a bit-for-bit match throughout the content lifecycle.

The ISM also helps mitigate the inevitable technology, business, service level and pricing changes, by maintaining multiple copies of content in multiple locations. This provides customers the critical ability to avoid vendor-lock. 

TURNING A CHORE INTO AN OPPORTUNITY

Moving entire or even partial repositories of content is often seen as a pain-point. But a content migration is the perfect opportunity to increase value and discoverability of your assets.

Here are some examples:

• Derive file hashes;
• Wrap edit projects and DPX sequences to increase speed and reduce egress costs; 
• Create descriptive metadata; 
• Transcode/re-wrap assets for normalization, new versions, or DR; 
• Create copies in disparate locations;  
• Generate proxies; 
• Generate a time aligned speech-to-text (STT) transcript; and 
• additional layers of Time Aligned Metadata:
  Text/logo/facial/location/sentiment recognition, scene/event detection, motion analysis 

CONCLUSIONS

Migrations of large media repositories are significant undertakings, but if you plan properly, take the time to evaluate existing resources and make sure that you have the relevant tools and management system, migrating from LTO to cloud can be smooth, disruption-free and a pathway to truly optimized content management.

The full version of this white paper is available at https://masstech.com/controlled-ascent-white-paper/. 

Mike Palmer is the former CTO for Masstech.

PARAMUS, N.J.—Sony Electronics has begun shipping its newly launched PetaSite Optical Disc Archive, a high-capacity archival storage solution that scales from 165 TB to 2.9 PB in a standard 42U rack.

The launch comes on the heels of Sony’s introduction of Gen3 high-capacity USB desktop drive units, Fibre Channel library drive units and 5.5 TB media cartridges.

The Sony archive solution offers secure, immutable data preservation and is well-suited for a variety of applications, the company said. The Gen3 enterprise class eight-channel, dual-sided optical drive is write-compatible with Generation 2 and backward-read-compatible with all Optical Disc Archive cartridges.

“Sony’s latest generation of optical drive technology addresses many issues with long-term storage, particularly with respect to its total cost of ownership,” said Theresa Alesso, Pro Division president, Sony Electronics. 

“Our new Gen3 system is backward compatible with previous versions of our optical drive components, which eliminates costly data migration projects and allows our customers to focus resources and dollars on other crucial business initiatives. Its low-power consumption also aligns with customers’ initiatives to drive greater storage density at lower operating costs in the data center.”

Gen3 PetaSite library products include the ODS-L30M master unit, ODS-L60E drive and cartridge extension unit and ODS-L100E cartridge-only extension unit.

The main building block of the library is the master unit, offering 165 TB capacity. Each extension unit with drive and cartridges offers 335.5TB. By itself, the cartridge unit offers 555.5 TB of storage. Up to five can be attached to the ODS-L30M, it said.

Each unit is 7U and includes a three-slot import/export station to load and unload media. Each Gen3 media cartridge stores 5.5TB, with an estimated shelf life of 100 years.

More information is available on the Sony website.

At this year’s Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) Annual Conference in Baltimore, four awards will be presented by the organization to individuals and organizations who have demonstrated exceptional work in the areas of preservation. The ceremony will take place on November 14 at the Parkway Theatre in Baltimore, where the convention runs from November 13 -16.

The 2019 recipients are:

• The Silver Light Award to Eddie Richmond, UCLA Film and Television Archive
• The Ray Edmondson Advocacy Award to South Side Home Movie Project, represented by Jacqueline Stewart, Sabrina Craig, and Candace Ming
• The Alan Stark Award to Adrian Wood, OWL Studio Ltd
• The William S. O’Farrell Volunteer Award to Snowden Becker, audiovisual archivist and educator

AMIA’s Silver Light Award recognizes career achievement in the field of moving image archives, including professional and volunteer works or activities, and contributions to preservation and restoration projects. For nearly four decades, Eddie Richmond was one of the principle executives of the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Eddie’s tenure has seen the archive grow from a few hundred titles to over 200,000 – the second largest public archive in the United States – and was integral to its move from rented space in Hollywood to the PHI Stoa, a state-of-the-art center in Santa Clarita built by The Packard Humanities Institute. A strong believer in collaboration, the range of Eddie’s many activities extend to the most important institutions across the globe.

In 2018, AMIA presented its first Advocacy Award to Ray Edmondson in recognition of his history of advocacy for cinema, archives and archivists around the world. This year, the newly named Ray Edmondson Advocacy Award will honor the South Side Home Movie Project. The project is an archival and research initiative to collect, preserve and exhibit amateur films from Chicago’s South Side neighborhood. The South Side Home Movie Project grew from the notable absence home movies (especially from minorities) in the canon of film scholarship which is only now beginning to change. The project also seeks to provide context and history for this historic neighborhood.

The Alan Stark Award honors individuals who have made a significant contribution through their efforts on a special project or in project management that contributes to, and supports, the work of moving image archives and/or the operations of AMIA. When Adrian Wood began working with the International Olympics Committee in 1996, it was at a time when the Olympic film collection was virtually lost. Over a 12 year period he worked, supported by eight local researchers, with thirty-one archives, broadcasters, production studios and libraries, eleven laboratories, seven specialist restoration facilities for sound and image on five continents. These collaborations led to the recovery and restoration of more than 40 long-form documentaries and 60 additional short films. Together the Olympic films form a body of work that provides a unique audiovisual legacy not only of sport but of style, fashion, sports technology and production methodologies captured on a four year cycle, (except when interrupted by war), and so thereby creating a unique collection.

The William S. O’Farrell Volunteer Award is named for long-time member Bill O’Farrell honoring his volunteer efforts and mentoring role he played over the years to so many archivists. This year’s recipient, Snowden Becker, is the glue between dozens of archival communities that all overlap because of her commitment and involvement in the field. She is an advocate and mentor for those who aim to contribute to media archival scholarship and praxis, and a vigilant promoter of good work being done in the archival community. Snowden has served on the Board of Directors, a Committee Chair, and at has been instrumental in developing new that welcome newcomers to the association and the annual conference. Beyond her duties running the UCLA Moving Image Archive Studies and Masters of Library and Information Science programs, Snowden has always gone above and beyond to mentor and prepare students to work in the archival field after graduation, and continues to meet with alumni long after they graduate to help them navigate working in the media archiving industry. With what little free time Snowden had left after her full-time job and work for AMIA, she founded the Center for Home Movies and created the structure for Home Movie Day, which now has grown into an international event

More than 650 professionals representing the world’s major media institutions gather each year for AMIA’s Annual Conference. Attendees represent all areas of the community-corporate and national archives, media companies, libraries, historical societies, service providers, universities, and more. Workshops, screenings, and more than 60 sessions programmed by working archivists address the best ways to preserve and provide access to our media.

For more information on the full program, or to register for the AMIA Annual Conference, visit www.amiaconference.net. 

Stand A113, Broadcast India 2019, Mumbai: Cinegy, the global leader for broadcast playout software in the cloud, has announced that it will showcase its full range of recording, capture, archive, and encoding capabilities during Broadcast India, taking place at the Bombay Exhibition Centre, Mumbai, from 17-19 October.

Participating on its regional partner Setron India’s stand, Cinegy will feature its ability to maximise the multiple advantages of Secure Reliable Transport (SRT).

Cinegy Business Development Manager Andrew Ward said, “SRT enables users to locate content, tools, and services wherever their business needs them to be, whether that’s in the cloud, on rented virtual machines, on-prem, or at remote data centres."

Ward continued, “SRT is baked in to Cinegy software, including the license, which removes any concerns about whether users have the legal right, proper subscription, or adequate bandwidth to deploy the software.”

Cinegy will demonstrate the use of its SRT-enabled software to perform live, intercontinental playout from the company’s server in Nuremberg, Germany, to the trade show in Mumbai. Also on show is Cinegy software and SRT jointly used as a sophisticated tool for live news gathering.

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About Cinegy
Cinegy develops software solutions for collaborative workflow encompassing IP, capture, editing and playout services tools, integrated into an active archive for full digital asset management. Either SaaS, virtualizable stacks, cloud or on-premises, Cinegy is COTS using standard IT hardware, and non-proprietary storage technology. Cinegy products are reliable, affordable, scalable, easily deployable and intuitive. Cinegy is truly Software Defined Television. Visit www.cinegy.com for more details.

Cinegy PR Contact:
Jennie Marwick-Evans
Manor Marketing
jennie@manormarketing.tv
+44 (0) 7748 636171

COSTA MESA, Calif.—Veritone is heading to the big leagues, as the company has announced that its aiWARE artificial intelligence systems has been acquired by the San Francisco Giants to work with its 60-year media archive and help drive fan engagement.

The aiWARE system utilizes its AI technology to enable rapid content search and accelerated asset sharing with media partners, internal web and social media teams and with fans during live games. When content is ingested into the aiWARE system, multiple cognitive AI engines start to automatically transcribe the audio, recognize faces and run other selected cognition to create in-depth meta data in near-real time, allowing for advanced search capabilities through keywords, athlete descriptions, locations, logos, play-by-play commentary and more. This will allow the SFG Productions team to search through its 60 years worth of content more quickly.

There is also the Veritone Digital Media Hub that makes these clips available in the cloud. The portal is permission-based and provides centralized access to all assets from anywhere. Digital Media Hub also has an AI-enabled search functionality.

The Giants are celebrating their 20th anniversary at Oracle Park in 2020 and plans to use the Veritone system to highlight memorable moments from the past and present, according to Paul Hodges, vice president for the SFG Productions team.

IBC 2019, 13-17 September, Stand 7.A01: Cinegy, the global leader for broadcast playout software in the cloud, has announced that it will showcase the full scope of its 8K recording, capture, archive, and encoding capabilities during IBC 2019.

On its IBC stand, Cinegy will feature the eye-popping Sharp 8M-B80AX1E 8K displays, the first 80-inch 8K professional display to be mass produced. The Sharp 8M-B80AX1E has 33 million pixels (7680 x 4320), four times that of 4K UHD and sixteen times the resolution of full HD.

Cinegy CEO Jan Weigner said, “Earlier this year we announced that our entire software-defined television product range is now 8K capable. We had an opportunity to thoroughly test and confirm those capabilities on Sharp’s new 8K displays at their Hamburg offices.

“We connected a small PC running our Cinegy Player 3 software and played 8K clips that had been filmed by a Sharp 8K camera and the results were astonishing. I can confirm that Sharp’s 8K displays are the only ones to date that legitimately display a true 8K picture using existing NVIDIA graphics cards on a Cinegy software-powered PC or workstation.”

Peter Heins, Senior Product Manager, Visual Solutions, Sharp Information Systems Europe, further clarified, “We are proud to be working with Cinegy, showcasing our latest addition to Sharp’s 8K ecosystem. We are delivering on our vision to charge the world with 8K, offering resolution that transforms our ability to display reality and Cinegy is uniquely positioned to take advantage of this vision. The new 80-inch 8K display will support new and exciting business applications that rely on ultimate image precision and clarity, and we look forward to seeing the benefits of our collaboration with Cinegy.”

In addition to showcasing real-time 8K imagery on its stand, Cinegy will also feature other 8K-ready products that are expanding Cinegy software’s appeal in enterprise IT and professional AV markets.

Weigner added, “All of this is to clearly illustrate, rather than just talk about, the fact that working in 8K from end to end – in real time - has never been easier. Affordable 8K SDI cards are readily available, Sharp’s display is the current 8K benchmark, and our software, in combination with our Daniel2 GPU codec, eliminate any obstacles to 8K production. Furthermore, by bringing the Daniel2 codec to Adobe Premiere for Windows and Mac, we open up the world of 8K production to millions of existing Adobe users.”

Cinegy will demonstrate its 8K capabilities on in Hall 7, Stand A01 during IBC 2019. For more information, visit www.cinegy.com

###

About Cinegy
Cinegy develops software solutions for collaborative workflow encompassing IP, capture, editing and playout services tools, integrated into an active archive for full digital asset management. Either SaaS, virtualizable stacks, cloud or on-premises, Cinegy is COTS using standard IT hardware, and non-proprietary storage technology. Cinegy products are reliable, affordable, scalable, easily deployable and intuitive. Cinegy is truly Software Defined Television. Visit www.cinegy.com for more details.

About Sharp Information Systems Europe
Sharp Information Systems Europe (SISE) is a division of Sharp Electronics Europe, which offers a unique portfolio of award-winning document management and display solutions to help organisations transform the way they engage with information. Sharp’s industry-leading MFPs and large production systems sit at the heart of integrated applications for digital transformation, while our display solutions include innovative video walls, digital signage displays and interactive flat panel displays for collaborative presentations. Our mission is to develop new products that support individual expression; creating life enhancing experiences that let you be original. For more information, please visit www.sharp.eu


Cinegy PR Contact:
Jennie Marwick-Evans
Manor Marketing
jennie@manormarketing.tv
+44 (0) 7748 636171

LTO is under attack from a wide variety of new technologies that challenge the very existence of the format and its relevance. Coupled with the fact that many broadcasters are pushing more of their archive content onto local or private cloud platforms, it is hard to see how LTO is still standing.

For sports broadcasters, it is more important than ever to be able to see the content you have then consolidate it to create a meaningful archive that can be accessed at any time for replays or clips from old matches. And furthermore there is a strong desire to re-archive older tape formats before those tapes become unreadable and sports events of the past become completely lost. Is it relevant to put those old tapes back on to another tape format?

Is there even a point to the tape format anymore or is it only surviving because of “better the devil you know”; doomed to disappear altogether once people become educated to alternatives?

DEMAND FOR ONLINE SPORTS

Many stats point to a shake-up in traditional TV for sports coverage. Take the NFL, for example, where, according to Nielsen, viewing is down 8.2 percent from the same period last year. And, last year Sky in the U.K. stated a strong shift of viewing of the Premier League to their online platforms. Amazon are rumored to be bidding to show future Premier League seasons. Undoubtedly, the shift is set to continue, as younger viewers in particular are more likely to watch sports on digital platforms.

For digital viewing, instant access to content is a must. No wonder broadcasters are pushing more content onto on-premises or off-premises (private or public) cloud platforms. The benefits can be fantastic: with instant access to catch-up reels and to pull out historic content. What other type of content suddenly prompts the need to find something that was aired several decades ago? But that happens all the time in sports, whether that be a rundown of all the tries scored by a retiring rugby player, the re-run of a historic win, or the moment a team was promoted or even demoted.

[Read: LTO Program Introduces Generation 8 Of LTO Ultrium]

Sports broadcasters need superfast access, and not just the low-resolution proxies, to make effective use of these moments. At a recent Amazon seminar in LA a number of speakers, from global broadcasters, explained how the need for instant access meant they were hammering their LTO libraries in such a way that failure rates inevitably rose dramatically. They determined that for frequent, fast access LTO is not the appropriate platform.

Or course, tape used to be the only real option for media libraries. However, now the cost of both disk and cloud services have come down a great deal, which makes me wonder whether anyone actually prefers LTO to disk for an active archive.

TAPE WILL LIVE ON

While it is true that new formats are being released all the time and tape can’t efficiently do all that disk storage can do, it isn’t dead yet. Not only that, I believe it will live on for the foreseeable future. Given the low costs of the tape media itself, it is easy to see why it has a place for “fire and forget” workflows. Of course, there are a lot of those types of workflows, even in the sports arena. Let’s face it, we all know there are matches we never want to watch again. Even sports entertainment eventually has a shelf live, and being able to literally put a tape on a shelf with a low dollar per gigabyte cost makes a lot of sense for that content.

LTO can also integrate quite nicely with other storage solutions. For our part, our solution is used in a number of deployments with LTO partners, where MatrixStore is an active cache and the LTO is used for the “dormant” assets.

The argument will likely continue over coming years, with some stating content is more secure on tape, while others argue the opposite. The argument around cost is also a hotly debated one, with many conflicting studies on whether or not the cost gap is closing.

Ultimately, I believe a number of things:

1. Tape will be around for many years to come, however it will be used in fewer use cases than today.

One example is that it might have been previously been OK to keep old footage on the shelf just-in-case it is needed; now, old footage is sold to sports teams and is looked at for analytics and AI metadata extraction. Assuming that footage won’t be re-used at all after the live event is a dead concept. However, it could be that there is footage from minor sports events that after a certain period of time is deemed to have a low probability of being looked at again.

Maybe those use cases will be cause for a lot of tapes to be sold making the tape industry appear “steady” but only in the context of a world that is storing increasing amounts of data.

2. Tape will only really be chosen on the basis of financial reasons, as there are very few valid technical reasons to consider it.

The pure fact that tape has to wind its way through to a file, over disk, which can get to the file in nanoseconds is the clear and simple problem. Add to that problems of maintaining tapes, problems of migration between formats and problems of tape versions going out of date and it is a technology that a few love but many hate.

3. More sports broadcasters will be looking for the value than an active archive can bring.

An active archive adds value to an organization, making it much easier for broadcasters to monetize content. This is because it is much easier to find and extract at any given moment and it also enables automated workflows which make the whole process much more efficient. An archive at rest cannot add value in this way and purely adds cost. For example, a Swedish minor league football broadcaster now sells the footage of the games played by their rivals to the clubs for the purpose of analytics. Furthermore, old games can be purchased for viewing by fans. Although the turnover for lower league teams is fairly low it still funds the broadcasting and archiving operations.

Essentially, the right storage really depends on what your priorities are. If you need deep cold storage, LTO or optical disc archive (ODA) may well be less expensive. However, if you need instant or frequent access to your content, then LTO simply won’t cut it.

Jon Morgan is the CEO of Object Matrix.

WALNUT CREEK, CALIF.—The SXL-8500 series, a range of scalable LTO archive systems, are now available from XenData. The base model offers a 6U robotic library with two LTO-7 drives and 77 LTO cartridge slots that provide 462 TB of near-line LTO capacity. The unit can handle the addition of up to six 80 slot expansion modules to accommodate 557 LTO-7 catridges for a near-line LTO capacity of 3,342 TB, or can be configured with up to 10 LTO-7 drives.

The SXL-8500 systems run on a Windows Server 2012 R2 operating system but are ready for an upgrade to Windows Server 2016. The units can connect to a network via 1 GbE or 10 GbE ports for a network attached storage architecture configured with a network share. A system also features a standard file-folder interface to archive and restore files.

Cartridge interchange is capable by the system writing to LTO using the LTFS format. This offers functionality that includes seamless spanning of files and folders across LTO cartridges, partial file restores, automatic replication of LTO cartridges and management of an unlimited number of offline externalized cartridges.

SXL-8500 series models are compatible with a range of media asset management systems. They are also able to support XenData VS functionality, which includes the ability to retain files on LTO for a defined retention period, after which the content is deleted and the LTO cartridges are reformatted and ready for re-use.

XenData is offering the SXL-8500 series 462 TB model for $51,800.

LIÈGE, BELGIUM—The baseball season is heading into the dog days of summer, and the Rogers Centre, home of the Toronto Blue Jays, has just announced a recent acquisition. The stadium has brought in EVS gear to assist with its live production to archiving system.

At the center of this new workflow is EVS’ IPDirector content management platform with integrated archive capabilities. The system provides integration with deep archive for back-and-forth media exchange for fast content turnaround. The system works alongside SGL’s FlashNet content management system, which stores highlights and content from prior seasons. With this workflow, Rogers Centre can search and access specific content, view on low resolution and send to the EVS XS or XT server for playout or to editing systems.

In addition, the workflow also includes a six-channel 6U XS media server, XT3 live production servers and XStore shared storage.

LAS VEGAS—DFT will demonstrate a new Wetgate system for its Scanity HDR film scanner at the 2016 NAB Show. This Wetgate provides a real-time, high-quality solution for challenging historical and archival film transfer issues, such as dust and scratch removal.

Scanity HDR

DFT will also have the latest Scanity software release, which includes a patented black and white HDR function and a new triple exposure during real-time 2K or 4K data ingest. Since the scanner speed remains constant, rather than slowing down, it allows faster access to previously unseen details from the high and low lights of the film, resulting in significant time and cost benefits.

Scanity HDR also offers other features for film archive scanning features for mass digitization, EDL/conform scanning, low resolution browsing for archive and restoration, short-form commercials, and 4K UHD ready and digital intermediate scanning. Scanity also offers a touchless patented capstan drive Lens Gate Assembly system, which combines automatic shrinkage compensation and gentle film handling with the high-caliber image stability older films require. DFT also plans to demonstrate a new 16mm/8mm small gauge film gate strategy, including the optional “16plus” LGA for the Scanity and new Scanity HDR models.

The 2016 NAB Show takes place in Las Vegas, April 18-21. DFT will be in booth SL10530. For more information, visit www.nabshow.com.

BOSTON—New York-based broadcaster WMHT has announced it is revamping its TV, radio and web media management infrastructure with the addition of EditShare end-to-end workflow systems. The trio of systems being added includes the distributed shared storage XStream EFS, integrated Flow media asset management and Ark Tape offline archiving system to centralize all of the broadcasters TV, radio and web content.

The XStream EFS system offers WMHT a centralized location to store its content, as well as providing the high availability needed for rapid content creation without a point of failure. The Flow then serves as a control layer for managing content across WMHT departments, providing tools to manage the ingest of content.

EditShare’s Ark Tape system then provides offline archiving. Fully integrated with the XStream EFS, Ark Tape is a tiered storage environment with automated backups and comprehensive media restoration capabilities.

WMHT also announced that it has added EditShare’s AirFlow web-based management module for remote production capabilities and access to media on the go.

EditShare is a Boston-based provider of networked shared storage and tapeless, end-to-end workflow systems.

BERKSHIRE, ENGLAND—Marquis’ Project Parking archive retrieving system has been selected by Warner Bros. Television Production U.K. to aid with the parking of projects.

Greg Light, senior edit assistant, Warner Bros.

With Project Parking now developed to be an Avid storage management system, WBTVP U.K. will use the system to manage Avid projects on its 250 TB EditShare and 96 TB Isis storage. Project Parking is also being used to move projects that started on EditShare to Avid Isis storage.

“The workspace analysis in Project Parking is now key in offering a clear view of storage usage per production/project,” said Greg Light, senior edit assistant at Warner Bros. “Finding orphaned files or those that have been saved to incorrect locations is also very useful.”

Marquis Broadcast is a provider of technology that moves media and metadata between different systems in broadcast and post-production workflows. The company is based in Berkshire, England.

WALNUT CREEK, CALIF.—Video archive technology provider XenData has announced its new SXL-8 archive system is now available for shipping. The SXL-8 is based on XenData’s SX-250 archive server and an LTO-7 autoloader that can hold up to seven cartridges. It attaches to a network via 1GbE or 10GbE and manages digital content across three tiers of storage: 6TB of disk within the server; 42 TB of near-line LTO; and unlimited capacity of offline LTO cartridges.

SXL-8 diagram

With the LTO-7 autoloader, the system automatically initializes and loads blank cartridges when needed as the archive grows. If automatic LTO cartridge replication is selected, the system can be scheduled to update replica cartridges overnight. The system also issues alerts and on-screen messages when operator intervention is required to exchange full LTO tapes for blank cartridges, or to import an offline cartridge for file restores.

Files are presented in a standard file/folder structure that is shared over the network, resulting in the archive appearing just like a disk drive. Files are transferred using either the standard Windows network protocol or FTP file transfers. The system also provides an object storage interface using an XML API. Software modules are available to deliver a tight integration with specific applications. Video files may be archived and restored manually to a file-folder structure using Windows Explorer or FTP utilities.

The SXL-8 writes to either 6 TB LTO-7 or 2.5 TB LTO-6 cartridges usinig the LTFS exchange format or the open standard TAR format.

XenData’s SXL-8 is available at a starting price fo $15,880.