Over the relatively short history of television broadcasting, archives have developed both technologically and in importance. There has been a progression from reels of film or telerecordings to videotapes—all on shelves— to the digitized deep storage of LTO (Linear Tape-Open) and disk drives, with solid-state flash memory and servers later bringing even more choice.

The cloud is now seen as a viable alternative to these methods in a media market that finally recognizes the financial value and potential of its assets, both historic and recent. Some broadcasters have made a wholesale move into the cloud for archiving, but others prefer a hybrid approach. This is highlighted in the 2025 annual report from the Active Archive Alliance (AAA), which promotes “active archives” that provide quick access to secondary storage systems, with the data always available online for fast recovery and review.

Stop Start
“I had seen many companies gravitating towards the cloud when it first came out, and then there was a bit of pulling back and potentially even repatriating data out of the cloud,” said Eric Polet, co-chair of the AAA and director of product marketing at software platform developer Arcitecta. “What I’m seeing now is a lot of hybrid cloud for distribution and sharing content, oftentimes bringing long-term preservation back on-prem.”

Polet’s co-chair, Rich Gadomski, director of channel sales and new business development for data- storage solutions with Fujifilm North America Corp., added that the AAA is “technology-agnostic,” with all main archiving media represented: optical, Savartus; solid state drives (SSD)/hard disk drives (HDD), Western Digital; tape, IBM, Fujifilm and Spectra Logic; and the cloud, Wasabi.

“Regardless of where the data is being stored, it can be accessed on-prem or in the cloud,” Gadomski said. “The volume of data, and its importance and value, has increased tremendously, so nobody wants to delete anything.”

From the cloud perspective, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is seeing many of the world’s leading broadcast and media and entertainment organizations commit their archives to the platform. But Stephanie Lone, global leader of solutions architecture for media, entertainment, games and sports at AWS, acknowledged that, in some cases, there is a hybrid element to the setup.

“The demos we give at the NAB Show and IBC often have the workspaces on physical hardware,” she said. “This means people have the tactile response they love, but don’t know if it is happening on the cloud or a hard drive under a desk. We’ve worked well in these hybrid environments with broadcasters and continue to do so.”

In addition to this, Lone added, full cloud transfer is also being undertaken by leading broadcasters. “Warner Bros. Discovery has an entire secure media supply chain on AWS, migrating petabytes of content to serve its customer base, which is approximately 95 million [HBO] Max subscribers alone,” she said. “Without the cloud, media companies can’t deliver or monetize their content across the digital landscape they’re in today.”

Have a Clear Roadmap
Avid produces cloud-compatible tools, including the MediaCentral workflow-management system and NEXIS storage platform, which can also connect with LTO archives. “Many broadcasters are still exploring the best use of cloud for their workflows,” observed Craig Wilson, product evangelist for artist relations at the company, with archiving a growing area.

“Cost of egress remains an issue, so broadcasters are focused on studying the total cost of ownership to ensure full value for their investment,” he said.

James Fraser, vice president of U.S. sales at content discovery platform developer Moments Lab, observed that most broadcasters are either actively migrating their archives to the cloud or running a hybrid model.

“But they have a clear road map over time to push more content into the cloud because of accessibility,” he said. “On-premises systems have done a tremendous job over the years, but cloud technology has allowed organizations more global access to their content, both from within the business and for third parties.”

Ease of access and moving away from physical in-house libraries would appear to be compelling arguments in favor of cloud-based archives, but SSD, HDD and tape systems are still used by on-prem setups. Other World Computing (OWC) is known for its range of internal SSD and RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) systems, but last year launched the Archive Pro Ethernet network-based LTO backup and archiving system.

“We were not an LTO company and I wasn’t an advocate for it,” OWC Founder and CEO Larry O’Connor said. “But from large organizations to individual producers, there is a desire to have what is ultimately cost-effective storage that’s air-gapped and has longevity without requiring ongoing maintenance.”

O’Connor called the cloud “an amazing tool,” but said the cost of uploading and then accessing content can be “exorbitant.” That hasn’t been AWS’ experience, Lone said, citing public broadcaster Korean Broadcasting System (KBS), which has moved all of its digital media services into the cloud.

“This has allowed them the flexibility to support its surging traffic and maintain security but [also] save more than 50% on event services,” she said. “When thinking about the cost implications of moving broadcast archives, each customer’s implementation varies.”

What About AI?
As part of this, Lone said, many broadcasters and media-related organizations are utilizing AI and machine learning (ML) to automate tagging of assets transferred to the cloud “for better discoverability.” A recent report on the archive market confirms this, showing AI-driven media archives are now “a top priority across nearly every M&E segment.”

The State of Media Archiving survey from object-based storage specialist Pixitmedia by DataCore revealed that of the 330 M&E professionals questioned, 30% of studios and 46% of enterprises are embedding AI/ML “to enhance content operations.”

The survey also reveals that only 6% percent of M&E companies have moved to a single platform for media archiving. The overall feeling, as shown by the AAA report, is that hybrid operations are now more the norm, with older technologies, including LTO and drives, still part of the picture for secondary storage, if not the amain archive.

Either way, it is reassuring that preserving TV programs—by whatever means—is now a major consideration for broadcasters and streamers alike.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla.—A new survey from Pixitmedia by Datacore revealed a major shift in the Media & Entertainment industry in media archiving, with 85% of respondents saying they plan to migrate to a horizontally integrated approach to their assets and media management.

The global survey, “State of Media Archiving,” found a desire to move away from fragmented, multigeneration systems as the ability to scale and derive greater efficiencies is impeded by integration costs, data silos and inefficient collaboration—the main drivers for the shift.

“Our findings underscore what many in the industry already feel: traditional, siloed media archiving systems can’t keep up, and workflows must evolve to meet new operational realities, Barry Evans, Pixitmedia senior vice president of product development, said. “With data and content libraries expanding across both traditional and digital-native segments, migrating to a unified, horizontally integrated approach enables companies to streamline operations, support collaboration across regions and position themselves for sustainable growth in an increasingly content-driven market.”

A total of 330 M&E professionals were questioned for the inaugural Pixitmedia survey. Forty-five percent of respondents said automation, metadata enrichment and third-party integration were key workflow challenges faced by their organizations.

In response, 76% of organizations plan to increase technology budgets over the next 12 months to modernize archiving capabilities to support content-intensive operations, the survey found.

As of 2025, only 6% of M&E companies have fully migrated to a single-platform approach to media archiving. Ten percent of digital service providers and 7% of houses of worship are the lead early adopters, while TV and video broadcasters remain the slowest to make the shift, with just 3% completed and 10% reporting no migration plans.

Adoption intent, however, is strong. Seventy-five percent of houses of worship are currently evaluating ROI and business benefits, and all sports franchises surveyed plan to migrate within the next 24 months, the survey found.

Hybrid deployments continue to dominate across M&E strategies, preferred by 42% of respondents. Looking ahead, 40% expect hybrid setups to remain their preferred configuration in 2026. Adoption varies by sector, with 69% of houses of worship and 58% of enterprise video teams leading the way. Currently, one-quarter of respondents favor on-premises deployment, a figure expected to rise to 31% among those planning to host media archiving workflows in-house over the next 12 months.

AI-driven media archiving is now a top priority across nearly every M&E segment. Up to 39% of studios and 46% of enterprises are embedding AI/ML to enhance content operations. A total of 45% of respondents cited operational productivity as the primary benefit of AI/ML integration in media archiving workflows, with metadata enrichment, automated search and deduplication the most in-demand AI capabilities, it found.

Pixitmedia is the media division of Datacore Software. It provides nearline and active archive solutions, as well as workflow applications.

Survey findings are available on the company’s website.

More information is available here.

We live in a world dominated by screens. With the vast amount of available screen space, streaming services are facing increased competition to produce compelling new content that not only keeps existing subscribers engaged but also attracts new viewers. In recent years, the rising demand has highlighted a valuable business opportunity for broadcasters and studios: repurposing their untapped archive content.

By delving into their archives, media organizations can recreate fresh content from old footage, edit video clips into social posts, turn audio files into podcasts or deliver 24/7 content for free, ad-supported streaming television (FAST) channels. And it doesn’t always mean rehashing the same content; often it provides brand-new perspectives to a familiar story, informs new stories or even reignites a show’s popularity for an entirely new generation. This innovative approach sets content creators apart, helping them thrive and stay ahead of the competition in a crowded market.

But before we dive in headfirst, what exactly is archiving when it comes to content?

Growing Demand for Unscripted Content
Archiving is the systematic process of collecting, organizing, preserving, and providing access to existing media content. It includes anything from video and audio recordings, to photographs and documents. Archiving has become a popular venture for media organizations since it empowers them to create new and engaging content for their audiences by using existing footage. This is especially prevalent when repurposing and creating new angles for documentaries.

Studies show the demand for this type of repurposed content increased by 44% from 2021 to 2023. This significant rise is due to several factors. Audience interest in nostalgic and authentic content, or cultural memory, dramatically increased during the pandemic as viewers were stuck at home and productions were put on hold.

This led to a significant spike in new platforms needing to deliver 24/7 content. Repurposing old content and unscripted content grew again during the 2023 Hollywood actors and writers strikes, which slowed the production of scripted TV and movies. In addition,broadcasters and studios continue to face budget cuts and financial pressures, making it necessary to manage production costs carefully. Repurposing existing content is a cost-effective alternative that allows them to deliver fresh content for new generations while also meeting the demands of today’s audiences.

Take Netflix, for example. This year has seen a surge in new documentaries made from old content. Documentaries including, Apollo 13: Survival, I Am Celine Dion, Return of the King: The Rise and Fall of Elvis Presley and Back to Black have all been created by using archived footage. These films are key examples of a growing trend of using legacy content to construct compelling stories. In the case of shows like these, archiving not only protects stories from getting lost in time, but also educates new audiences and future generations. It invites viewers to learn more about a topic for themselves while also providing them access to never-seen-before content.

Investing in the Past
Digging into the past is a significantly invaluable and underestimated concept for the media industry. It saves them time, money, and resources while letting them keep up with the production demands of the modern day.

The streaming landscape is fiercely competitive. Ninety-nine percent of U.S. households now subscribe to at least one streaming service—Netflix topping the charts with a 13% year-on-year growth rate. Content providers are constantly searching for new ways to engage and connect with their audiences. Today’s popular streaming platforms mean that archival footage is now more accessible to a global audience than ever before. With current viewer preferences in favor of raw, authentic content, it’s easy to see the business benefit of archived content.

Now is the perfect time for media organizations to tap into their archives. It will lead them to an invaluable outcome: increased return on investment (ROI.) There are several ways in which archival content sets the stage for this result. For example, repurposing content into new programming to be distributed across multiple platforms increases audience reach and, in turn, potential revenue. In addition, the same content can be presented in different formats on different platforms to reach new audiences.

Future-Proofing Through Archiving
Preserving content ensures that media organizations can protect their work for future generations, boost its longevity and relevance for new generations and create revenue opportunities. Archived content can also be repurposed to craft engaging brand stories that highlight the company's history, values, and impact. This strategy not only enhances brand reputation but also strengthens brand loyalty and helps attract new customers.

These factors collectively make content archiving an essential business strategy for media organizations looking to maximize return on investment and future-proof their brand and business. To fully leverage the potential of archiving, media organizations should develop a comprehensive media archiving strategy, invest in a reliable system and explore partnerships with other organizations or archival institutions to share resources and expertise. By prioritizing archiving, it not only safeguards their valuable content and preserves a legacy but also unlocks new opportunities for future content creation and innovation.

The primary value for media organizations in utilizing archival content lies in the significant boost to ROI. By capitalizing on trends such as the growing demand for documentaries, organizations can repurpose existing content, saving both time and resources that can be redirected to other initiatives, all while delivering engaging content that drives viewer engagement and revenue.

However, this approach should complement, not replace, the creating of original content. Rather than a substitute, it offers a profitable alternative that allows media organizations to thrive in today’s content-driven, streaming-dominated landscape where demand is constant and ever-growing.

NEVADA CITY, Calif.—Telestream today launched DIVA 9, the latest update to its middleware system for media management, access, and archiving. 

Targeting the complexities of long-term video asset storage, DIVA 9 introduces critical enhancements to bolster the accessibility, reliability, and efficiency of digital video archives, the company said, adding that the new version simplifies archiving with smart media storage policies, advanced Elasticsearch search functions, and comprehensive cloud integration, ensuring secure, scalable, and adaptable solutions. 

DIVA 9 includes a new Proxy player integrated with Telestream Vantage, simplifying clip identification, segment marking, and partial restore processes, offering unprecedented ease in handling video data, the company said. Telestream also said DIVA 9 is easier to deploy in cloud environments with  support for Postgres open source database, and compatibility with major cloud storage options, catering to both hybrid and native cloud setups.

“One of the qualities that makes DIVA 9 such a powerful solution is its widespread support for diverse production ecosystems, including cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments,” said Tom Pflaum, Vice President of Product Management at Telestream. “DIVA’s versatility makes it highly adaptable to various storage technologies, such as LTO, disks, and private cloud servers. It also effortlessly integrates with MAM, PAM, and automation systems to further enhance and enrich media supply chain workflows. It’s truly a comprehensive and flexible solution for content management.”

DIVA 9 features nearly 100 updates from its predecessor, focusing on improving system reliability, user experience, and operational efficiency, according to the company. Updates encompass bug and security fixes, performance enhancements, and usability improvements and the solution's intelligent media storage lifecycle policies aid in reducing costs while optimizing asset storage, Telestream said.

DIVA 9's Elasticsearch-driven search capabilities offer a unified view across multiple storage systems, ensuring efficient resource utilization. Its redundancy, distributed deployment options, and disaster recovery features enhance reliability for media production teams, the company said.

DIVA 9 centralizes content management, transcoding, and archiving, eliminating workflow silos, facilitating a more agile media supply chain, the company said. Integration with Telestream solutions like Vantage, Qualify QC, and GLIM Clipping & Inspections automates quality control, accelerates media processing, and enables efficient proxy-less playback.

With their ability to provide video storage cheaper and more flexibly than on-premises systems, cloud-based video archiving services have established themselves in the broadcast TV and streaming video markets. Their competitive edge is now being sharpened by the integration of artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) to cloud-based archiving systems—making these systems more accessible to users than ever before.

The AI/ML Advantage
The simplest way to understand AI/ML’s positive impact on cloud-based video archiving is this: AI/ML helps these platforms do everything they do better.

“Machine learning in the cloud has been a huge step forward in expanding its range of capabilities,” said Sam Peterson, COO of Bitcentral. “Speech-to-text and language translation have been two of the big advances lately, but these are only the tip of the iceberg.”

“Metadata AI and Generative AI are all the rage since ChatGPT opened eyes to what can be achieved,” agreed Jonathan Morgan; senior vice president of product and technology at Perifery, a division of DataCore Software. “Like a glove fits a hand, AI is built on data, and when it comes to media archives there is both a wealth of information and monetizable assets.”

Newsbridge’s cloud-based platform manages both archived and live video content in highly sophisticated ways, according to James Fraser, vice president of U.S. Sales for the company. Newsbridge’s MXT-1 is “our own in-house AI that we’ve built over a number of years,” he said. “The idea behind MXT-1 is to produce a human-like description of what AI is seeing in your content, to make it highly searchable. So rather than search for a recorded conference using a file name, you can ask MXT-1 to find a specific moment.”

Meanwhile, customers moving to AWS are exploring the company’s full portfolio of AI/ML products, said Josh Mello, AWS’ Senior Worldwide Storage Specialist. “One helpful offering is the Amazon Media2Cloud solution, which provides a framework for enhancing metadata collection media archives via AI/ML services, as these assets are placed in Amazon S3 Glacier,” he explained. 

“Additionally, many customers are pulling out insights on their consumers, as well as data on their content, using Amazon Rekognition. Amazon Transcribe is another AI service our customers are turning to in order to easily transcribe information pulled out of their media archive.”

Pros and Cons
There is no doubt that cloud-based archiving has caught on with TV broadcasters and streamers alike in recent years, even without the advantages being offered by AI/ML.

Cost is a major reason why: It is far cheaper to store content on third-party web-connected servers on a fee-for-service basis — which is what the cloud actually is — rather than invest in on-premise server farms and the IT staff to maintain them.

Then there’s data security: “In addition to offering 99.999999999% (11 nines) of data durability in every AWS Region, Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes simplify archive management,” said Mello. “Once a customer migrates to AWS, that’s it. They no longer need to worry about end-of-life support on existing infrastructure or get bogged down in the endless cycle of generational updates.”

Better yet, cloud storage providers like Newsbridge offer tiered levels of service for their customers, with instant retrieval cloud storage offering faster and more expensive access to customer content than “cold” or “deep archive.” This choice of options is made available for “cost optimization,” according to Fraser, and is proving popular with Newsbridge’s broadcast and streaming clients. 

“Another significant feature is the capability to store content off-site, providing a safeguard against on-site hardware failures or unexpected incidents,” Bitcentral’s Peterson said. “In the cloud, users can leverage multiple layers of storage and implement replication across different physical regions for added resilience.”

Best yet for M&E customers, AWS’ cloud-based archiving opens up the art of the possible for more interactive viewer engagement, new revenue streams through opportunities like FAST channels, plus “additional monetization efforts that leverage the vast amount of content available in customer archives,” said Mello.

Hybrid Approach
Still, the cloud isn’t a “one-size-fits-all” solution, Peterson readily admitted. “This is why some of our customers are fully cloud-native. But for other customers, it makes more business sense to employ a hybrid approach that simply adds to the capabilities of their existing physical storage.”

As well, some of the apparent advantages of cloud-based archiving can turn out to be disadvantages in certain circumstances. For example, when a broadcaster/streamer decides to use a large number of AI/ML apps to manage their cloud-stored media, there can be “large associated compute and access costs related to running those apps.” said Morgan. “Alternatively, the AI/ML apps required might be available on-premises and are likely to be significantly less expensive and quicker to run there.”

In the same vein, on-premises storage can prove to be a more economical option than cloud-based storage in some cases. “For instance, if a media archive can be stored in a ‘cold’ public tier and is rarely accessed, then public cloud might be a cost-effective way to go,” Morgan said. “But if the media archive is actively accessed, then public cloud costs can quickly mount.”

This being said, the many advantages offered by cloud-based archiving is ensuring its viability in the marketplace. This is why “the broadcasting and streaming industries are now far beyond the point where the cloud is treated merely as a byword for storage,” concluded Peterson. 

The National Association of Broadcasters celebrated its 100th year at the NAB Show in Las Vegas last month, inspiring the industry to reflect on the last century of broadcasting with archival footage, images, and stories. It was exciting to catch a glimpse of the history of NAB—and the broadcast industry in general—displayed throughout the show. It's valuable to have preserved footage to share and look back on for milestones, but today’s media organizations face a threat of obsolescence that can impede content preservation due to a lack of playback equipment and technical resources. 

The playback equipment needed for digitizing media assets is more difficult to obtain and is therefore more expensive and less accessible. Because of this, broadcasters and media organizations may face a future in which media migration services are no longer available, creating a scenario where legacy content can be lost forever. 

The reality is that archiving equipment, such as audio and video tape machines, are no longer supported by most original manufacturers. When the equipment wears out, it’s difficult to locate replacement parts. Auction sites and business closures have become a main source to purchase machines and parts. 

Media migration is a niche service with limited technical resources. The skills needed to operate, maintain, and repair playback equipment can be equated to the skills of electricians and mechanics— it’s a hands-on, specialized trade that requires knowledge of complex machinery. 

The number of people who can perform these skills continues to dwindle, as individuals age out of the industry. It’s important to make sure their skills are passed on before retirement. In addition, it’s difficult to attract younger talent, as many prefer roles that are digital, and software focused. 

The solution to these challenges may be to create more equipment and train more people, however, it’s doubtful manufacturers will create new equipment to play back legacy formats.  The worst-case, disaster scenario for broadcasters and content owners is that the technology becomes obsolete before they’ve had a chance to digitize their media libraries, effectively losing their collections once physical degradation sets in. 

Often budgetary factors affect an organization’s choice to start their migration journey, but the benefit of having an entire media library safe, accessible, and discoverable is worth the commitment. We’re continuing to see more and more examples of legacy content being used and monetized today. 

This was recently seen with HBO’s sports drama Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, which blends archival footage seamlessly with the scripted elements of the show. Of course, with all the talent and technical tools production teams have, they could replicate the look of archival footage, but using the real thing gives an authentic feel and allows audiences to truly go back in time. 

Aside from the obvious benefit of keeping assets safe, migrating a media library opens many possibilities for discovery and creative use. For example, there have been occasions when we’ve worked on projects and found content that customers didn’t know they had-- hidden gems that could be used for film, creative campaigns, social media, and website content. Digitizing media collections presents opportunities to give old content new life, preserving an organization’s past while also safeguarding its future. 

Due to the risk of media degradation and the obsolescence of playback equipment, broadcasters and the media and entertainment industry have taken the threat seriously. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has launched its Digital Preservation Forum, inviting industry professionals to discuss and address the challenges facing digital archiving and preservation. 

It’s important that we create a future where we have access to and can reflect on our past. Our hope is that in another century when NAB celebrates 200 years, we’ll have preserved as much archival footage, images and stories as possible, and future generations will have the opportunity to look back on the achievements of the first century of television without a sense of loss or regret. 

BLOOMINGTON, Ind.—Memnon, a provider of media preservation and migration services has completed a move to a new, purpose-built facility in Bloomington, Ind. that will act as the company headquarters for its U.S. operations.  

Since 2014, Memnon had been located on the campus of Indiana University, Bloomington, initially as a dedicated on-site delivery facility for a major multi-year migration project with the university. Now as both Memnon’s regional and global operations continue to grow, the team have moved to a new state-of-the-art facility on Liberty Drive.  

John McDonald has been appointed U.S. director of operations & production for the facility. Commenting on his new role, he said: “Memnon has an enviable reputation within the archiving community, and you can see that in the kinds of customers who trust us to look after their content and media. I’m excited to lead such an amazing team here in Bloomington, and I look forward to seeing what new opportunities the facility brings us.” 

Memnon says the new media migration and warehousing facility provides its team with more space which will improve overall capacity and efficiency across production and operations as well as allow for future expansion. Since the new site is just a few miles down the road from the former facility, Memnon says there will be no disruption to its operations.  

Commenting on the move, Heidi Shakespeare, Memnon CEO said: “The new facility was a project kickstarted by our late colleague Andrew DaPuzzo who we sadly lost last year. We see this move as a continuation of the legacy that he built here at Memnon.”  

“The move, and the exciting news of John’s appointment, are just the latest of several recent global developments that highlight Memnon’s continued commitment to providing a best-in-class service” Shakespeare added. “I want to also express my gratitude to the local and global Memnon teams—–as well as the systems integration team at our sister company ES Broadcast—for making this move to our new, more expansive facility a reality.” 

The move follows Memnon’s recent opening of a dedicated media facility in Wellington, New Zealand, and the appointment of several key members of the company’s leadership team both globally and in local markets. 

LONDON—ES Broadcast announced its acquisition of Sony’s Memnon archiving solution arm. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Memnon provides services worldwide to enable clients to digitize, preserve and access historical recordings. It operates facilities in Belgium, the United States and Australia.

This marks the second spinoff from Sony’s professional services recently. Earlier this month, the company announced the sale of its Sony New Media Solutions media cloud division to Deluxe.

ES Broadcast currently provides its media services mainly to U.K. clients through its LMH subsidiary. The acquisition expands its reach and augments its existing client offerings, which include systems integration, equipment sales and hire.

“The acquisition is an integral part of our global strategy of increasing the focus on services-led solutions,” said ES Broadcast group CEO Ben Murphy. “It is a powerful combination of two leading service providers with the ability to reach a global audience of media and entertainment clients as well as institutional businesses, such as museums, libraries, archives and universities.”

“Combining the expertise of Memnon’s existing team with the wider pool of highly technical talent at ES Broadcast’s disposal creates the exciting prospect of further solution innovation and service development across the business, which will only be of benefit to our customers.”

Current Memnon CEO Baku Morikuni will step down from his role as part of the transition. Michel Merten, who originally founded Memnon, will assume management of the company’s EMEA and APAC operation, while Andrew Dapuzzo will continue to steer the business in the U.S. LMH, which will maintain its focus on delivering media services to U.K. clients, is led by managing director Gary Edwards, who will help to oversee the integration of the two businesses.

ES Broadcast currently operates across 10 locations in the U.K., U.S. and Spain and works with sports bodies, broadcasters, service providers, institutions and historic and national library archives.

“With LMH having grown its digitization and archiving offering significantly in recent years, there are a lot of synergies with Memnon, which is recognized as a leading light in that area. We are excited to be bringing Memnon into the group and enabling its customers to access the wide range of services and unsurpassed technical expertise that ES Broadcast offers,” said Edward Saunders, executive chairman of ES Broadcast.

More information is available on the company’s website.

BOULDER, Colo.—The Active Archive Alliance has a new member, as StorMagic has officially joined the group of storage and IT vendors that work to advance new active archiving strategies, technologies and use cases to increase archival data value.

Active archives manage data for rapid search, retrieval and analytics, using an intelligent data management layer for online access to data. They are compatible with flash, disk, tape, optical or cloud, file, block or object storage systems.

StorMagic is a company that provides technical expertise and guidance for designing and implementing solutions for data growth challenges. Among its offerings is the ARQvault, an Active Intelligent Repository that enables customers to manage unstructured data, meet evolving needs and actively seek, find, retrieve and use data in real time.

“We are pleased to welcome StorMagic to the Active Archive Alliance,” said Betsy Doughty, vice president of Corporate Marketing at Spectra Logic and co-chair of the Active Archive Alliance. “As data grows at an accelerated pace, organizations are increasingly adopting active archive solutions to cost-effectively manage their digital archives while maintaining fast access to the data. StorMagic’s Active Intelligent Repository enriches the Alliance membership’s range of innovative active archive solutions for intelligent data management.”

The Active Archive Alliance now has 17 member and sponsor companies, including Fujifilm, IBM, Quantum, Spectra Logic, XenData, Western Digital and more.

For more information, visit www.activearchive.com.  

LONDON—The image of television archives and attitudes toward the business of archiving itself has changed dramatically over the last 20 years. When videotapes were digitized, there was still the thought that the programs were going into a deep archive.

Today, the explosion in channels and the need for legacy programming to fill schedules has brought about a change in how archive material is managed. The ubiquity of the cloud is also making an impact, although not to the extent that might be expected.

‘ACTIVE ARCHIVES’

Deep archives—the original conception of an information store where material could sit on a “shelf” indefinitely without being touched—still exist but the active archive has become a viable method of storing programs and other data. Active archives work on the same basic principles as their long-term counterparts but can be accessed more frequently. They work as an online resource and can be based in conjunction with any main storage options: flash disk, tape or cloud.

This concept is advocated by the Active Archive Alliance, organized as a “vendor-neutral” information resource to guide people in the design and implementation of modern archives. Celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2020, members already included Western Digital, Spectra, Fujifilm and Strong Box but last year saw a flurry of new additions to the ranks, including IBM, Quantum, Object Matrix and, just before Christmas, XenData.

Molly Presley, head of global product, brand and customer marketing at Qumulo, is a founding member of the AAA, and told the InsideHPC blog last February that the reason for founding the alliance was the “recognition of the rapidly increasing value held within unstructured data.”

AGILITY AND SPEED

The means of holding all this valuable material—be it LTO tape, disk arrays or the cloud—is well established. The element that enabled active archives—and which will drive archiving into the future—is the ability to find and move the data quickly, safely and efficiently.

A leader in this is EcoDigital (formerly Front Porch Digital), which was acquired by Telestream in October 2020. Geoff Tognetti, senior vice president of Telestream’s content storage management business unit, says that the DIVA software suite, “complements” Telestream’s “broader workflow tools” for distribution and orchestration.

Tognetti explains that EcoDigital’s systems are used to turn rich media into independent objects, which can then be moved around as needed. He observes that there is “still a strong need for data tape,” which forms a part of the active archive. “It’s not just a place to store stuff,” Tognetti says. “It is constantly used as a pool of material, with data being put on and taken off tape every day.”

In parallel to this, content objects are also sent to the cloud but Tognetti feels there are still aspects of this decentralized storage option that need addressing, specifically ingress costs.

“People are not charged to put data in but they are charged to get it out and move it around,” he said.

There is also the issue of data gravity. “Broadcasters have typically got 10 to 100 PB of storage, which is a big center of gravity,” Tognetti added. “This can be on tape or as objects in a near-line store on premises.”

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CLOUD AND ON-PREM

For Savva Mueller, vice president of product management at Masstech Innovations, LTO tends to be “most popular” on premises and sees the current big trend in storage for media and entertainment as an “accelerated move” towards the cloud.

“We have had some companies expressing interest in cloud archiving,” he says. “Pre-pandemic, most were still hesitant and very much in ‘wait and see mode,’ but now there is a greater acceleration and customers are seeing the cloud as something for 2021, 2022.”

Despite an increased interest in cloud archiving, Savva says potential users need to be reassured that any of their established workflows will be able to operate with the “new” technology.

“Cloud storage is fundamentally different to on-premises,” he explains, “so users want to be reassured that any processes they already have in place will be able to work in the same way as much as possible.”

The main public cloud providers—AWS Elemental (owned by Amazon Web Services), Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure—operate in similar ways, with tiered storage so that retrieval—which can take from between a few hours to one or two days—does not have an adverse effect on customers. A criticism levelled at the big cloud companies is that there is little or no opportunity to move data between different platforms or select specific tools from one supplier to use on another’s cloud. Mueller, for one, sees no reason why customers should not be able to use the feature of a cloud vendor even if they do not use its deep storage.

Signiant CTO Ian Hamilton says that although “there is no doubt that everything is moving to the cloud,” customers in the interim are turning to more “hybrid” operations.

“Anyone with more than 100 PB of storage should be considering the cloud,” he said. “And if you’re already in the cloud, why move data back and forth? There are the costs of moving material around but also benefits, such as not worrying about the choice between tape and spinning disk.”

Hamilton observes that the private cloud is a much more media-specific option but in general, archiving involves a lot of duplication to ensure adequate backup.

“There is a lot of redundancy in storing information and not every storage system is optimized for that,” he said. “But the big vendors can optimize at that level. We’ve seen the private cloud come into and go out of fashion over the past few years.”

THE IMPORTANCE OF AI

The pandemic has had a wide-ranging impact on broadcasting, prompting storage customers to consolidate their archives, according to Eric Bassier, senior director of product marketing at Quantum.

“With less content being created, because of Covid restrictions, companies are looking to figure out how to repurpose and remonetize content from the archive,” he said.

To enable this to happen efficiently, Bassier envisions new technologies and business models coming together.

“AI techniques and services are giving customers different ways of enriching content in their archive,” he says. “AI can also make archives more searchable. The algorithms are pretty good at recognizing the face of a celebrity in a single frame of video, which saves time having to manually search the archive.”

Quantum is also expanding its service offering, in response to what it sees as some of the downsides to the public cloud.

“It is expensive to run and customers give up control of their content,” Bassier says. “So we are building a private cloud and selling it as a low-cost service. This is something of a change for Quantum but we have to transform how we go to market and sell to our customers.”

Which shows that, somewhat ironically, while the purpose of an archive is to look back, the technology and business of archiving is certainly looking forward.

After the initial COVID outbreak, broadcasters focused on firefighting—adopting emergency measures to keep teams safe and maintain creative output. In light of the resurgence in cases, media companies are having to plan for continued remote working. Production and post-production workflows, which started out as business continuity measures, will have to become long-term solutions. 

Here are three key areas where cloud workflows can help maximize efficiencies and facilitate this transition.

ASSET STORAGE

Despite multiple ways of working and different business needs, all broadcasters have one thing in common—assets, and lots of them. While dealing with the challenges posed by the pandemic, this content presented both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, when production was halted by the initial outbreak, media companies could make use of their back-catalogue to fill the gap. On the other hand, the success of this approach relied heavily on how easy the content was to access. 

During lockdown, broadcasters whose content was stored on-site quickly realized that this made their archive difficult to leverage. Now media companies are focused on shifting libraries to systems that make content more accessible and searchable. By transitioning assets to the cloud in bulk and making use of innovations such as AI-powered metadata tagging, post-production teams can easily search for content remotely. 

Cloud storage is not just for archived content; recent footage needs to be managed effectively too. Whilst isolated from the office, many post-production teams found themselves needing to access thousands of hours of content to deliver projects imminently. They began working from home with hard-drives, which contained enough assets for the first few weeks. They then had to resort to the time-consuming process of uploading and downloading content, often struggling with broadband speeds that couldn’t support their workflows. 

Putting an end to this inefficient process of shifting files around is one of the most common requests from clients. The solution is utilizing cloud-based technology to create proxy workflows, which provide flexible access without extensive data transfer time for large video files. These proxy workflows are significantly more efficient, leaving editors with more time to spend doing what they do best.

A FLEXIBLE WORKFORCE

There is no doubt that the coming months and years will see huge changes in the way that organizations manage their teams. Remote workflows will need to be at the forefront of any changes to broadcasting infrastructure. Previously, this seemed like an impossible task for organizations weighed down by huge files and complex systems. Now, advances in cloud-based workflows mean that broadcasters can become more responsive to the changing needs of their workforce. 

With virtual editing technology no longer restricted by processing power requirements, the challenge for post-production teams is to choose the right remote tools for your organization’s working methods. First, broadcasters need to identify their business focus and the type of workflows their team implements. 

Browser-based web-edit tools are great for high-volume quick turnaround content. However, the adoption of these tools can be a challenge for large teams because they require editors to learn completely new workflows. It’s important for broadcasters to weigh the impact of retraining staff in these instances. Alternatively, remote access solutions can replicate an editor’s on-site workspace at home. Whether broadcasters opt to send proxy versions of content directly or completely mimic the user-interface will depend on their infrastructure needs. 

Regardless of the technical requirements, the key to implementing any new system is to enable broadcasters to put their team at the heart of infrastructure changes. By giving content creators the same flexibility to work from home as professionals in other sectors, clients have seen an improvement not only in productivity but in creativity as well. 

INFRASTRUCTURE AGILITY

Many broadcasters will scale up their workstation capacity over time, but that often leaves physical infrastructure sitting idle during quieter periods. Teams working at maximum capacity one week don’t always need the same level of infrastructure once an event ends or the news-cycle shifts.

Physical infrastructure represents a significant financial commitment and broadcasters need to be confident the investment is worth it to scale up. Unfortunately, this requires a certain amount of certainty, and that has definitely been in short supply during 2020. Investing in physical workstations that aren’t being utilized is the editing equivalent of keeping a cab outside with the meter running. 

In contrast, cloud-based infrastructure allows users to add and remove workstations in a matter of minutes. By deploying and managing workstations remotely, broadcasters can be truly responsive. Tracking which workstations are in use and which users are connected will completely streamline workflows.

AN ADAPTABLE FUTURE FOR BROADCASTING

Flexibility has been broadcasting’s biggest virtue over the last few months. The traditional annual schedule has been turned upside down and events have been thrown into disarray. With guidelines altering weekly and a shaky return to the sports calendar, the industry has seen the importance of responding quickly as circumstances change.

Broadcasting continues to show huge resilience in the face of difficult circumstances. Over the course of 2020, early responses and emergency business continuity measures have transformed into interim processes. Now, broadcasters need to take the next logical step into long-term cloud-based workflows. 

Any return to normal in the near future seems unlikely. By the time we reach a post-COVID future, the media industry will have completely adapted to the challenges of social distancing. However, the long-term value of cloud-based infrastructure extends far beyond the pandemic. Making changes now will enable broadcasters to leverage their assets more effectively, offer attractive flexible working options for their staff and future proof their infrastructure. The industry will always be subject to change, now is the time to prepare for it.

Tim Burton is managing director for 7fivefive.

WASHINGTON—Your content is only as valuable as your ability to monetize it. Fortunately for M&E companies, the ability to access, maintain and index legacy content has improved and become more flexible as things move to the cloud and utilize artificial intelligence and machine learning.

As more archives become digitized, the options for storing and accessing content have expanded.

In TV Technology’s latest eBook, “Guide to Archiving,” we take a look at the options available and how advances in AI are enabling M&E companies to monetize their most valuable assets.

Download the eBook for free online. 

Deciding, for the long run, where to keep an organization’s media-centric assets (i.e., original content, EDLs, finished masters, copies, versions, releases, etc.,) is reshaping the ways of storing or archiving data. Continued popularity in cloud-based solutions for ingest/content collection, playout from the cloud and processing in a virtual environment leads many to rethink “storage in the cloud.”

Yet cloud concerns still leave the door open to storage alternatives, tier-based migration, automated management and more.

What are the possible alternatives: Backup or archive? On-prem or in a co-lo? Private, hybrid or public cloud? Knowing the differences could create changes in how to approach archive management, regardless of the size, location or types of data libraries.

BACK IT UP OR ARCHIVE IT

Let’s look first at the differences in backup vs. archive.

Backup is a duplicate copy of data used to restore lost or corrupted data in the event of unexpected damage or catastrophic loss. By definition, all original data is retained even after a backup is created; original data is seldom deleted. Most backup just in case something happens to the original version, while for others, it is a routine process mandated either by policy or because they’ve previously suffered through a data disaster and pledge never to live through that again.

On a small scale, for a local workstation or laptop, practice suggests a nightly copy of the computer’s data be created to another storage medium, e.g., a NAS or portable 4-8 TB drive. Travel makes this difficult, so alternative online solutions prevail.

Businesses routinely backup their file servers (as unstructured data) and their databases (as structured data) as a precaution against a short-term issue with data on a local drive being corrupted. “Snap-shots” or “images” of an entire drive (OS, applications and data) are often suggested by administrators, software vendors, and portable hard drive manufacturers.

Incremental backups, whereby only new data or any which was changed since the last backup, are made due to the larger storage volumes and the time required for the full backup.

STORAGE AS A SERVICE

Archived data could be placed on a local NAS, transportable disk drive, an on-prem protected storage array partition, or linear data tape. Since an archive is about “putting the data on a shelf” (so to speak), the choices vary based on need.

Cloud archiving is about “storage as a service,” and is intended for long-term retention and preservation of data assets. Archives are where the data isn’t easily accessed and remains for a long uninterrupted time.

Archiving used to mean pushing data to a digital linear tape (DLT) drive and shipping those tapes to an “iron mountain-like” storage vault. In this model, recovering any needed data was a lengthy process involving retrieving the information from a vault, copying it to another tape, putting it onto a truck and returning the tape to the mothership where it was then copied back onto local storage, indexed against a database (MAM), and then made available on a NAS or SAN.

This method involves risks, including the loss or damage to tapes in transport, tapes which went bad or possibly had corrupted data onto the tape in the first place. Obsolescence of either the tape media or the actual drives meant that every few years a refresh of the data tapes was required, adding more risk in data corruption or other unknowns.

As technology moved onward, robotic tape libraries pushed the processes to creating two (tape) copies—one for the on-prem applications and one to place safely in a vault under a mountain somewhere. While this reduced some risks—such as placing duplicate copies in storage at diverse locations—it didn’t eliminate the “refresh cycle” and meant additional handling (shipping back tapes in the vault for updating). Refresh always added costs: tape library management, refresh cycle transport costs, tape updates including drives and physical media, plus the labor to perform those migrations and updates.

STORAGE OVERLOAD

Images keep getting larger. Formats above HD are now common, quality is improving, pushing “native” format editing (true 4K and 5K) upwards, added to dozens to hundreds more releases per program and keeping storage archive equations in continual check. As files get larger, the amount of physical media needed to store a master, such as protect copies and one or more archive copies of every file, is causing “storage overload.” Decisions on what to archive are balanced against costs and the unpredictable reality that the content may never need to be accessed again.

High-capacity, on-prem storage vaults can only grow so large—a hardware refresh on thousands of hard drives every couple years can be overwhelming from a cost and labor perspective. Object-based storage is solving some of those space or protection issues but having all your organization’s prime asset “eggs” in one basket is risky and not very smart business. So opens the door to cloud-based archiving.

MANY SHAPES AND SIZES

Fee-based products such as iCloud, Carbonite, Dropbox and such are good for some. These products, while cloud based, have varying schemes and work well for many users or businesses. Private iPhone users get Apple iCloud almost cost-free but with limited storage sizes. Other users prefer interfaces specifically for a drive or computer device with an unlimited storage or file count.

So why to pick one service over another? Is one a better long term solution versus another? Do we really want an archive or a readily accessible “copy” of the data in case of an HDD crash?

One common denominator to most commercial “backup/archive” services is they keep your data in “the cloud.” Data is generally accessible from any location with an internet connection and is replicated in at least three locations. However, getting your data back (from a less costly archive) has a number of cost-and non-cost-based perspectives. Recovering a few files or photos is relatively straightforward but getting “gigabytes” of files back is another question. So beware of what you sign up for and know what you’re paying for and why.

Beyond these common points is where the divisions of capabilities, accessibility, cost, serviceability, and reliability become key production indicators which in turn drive differing uses or applications.

ACCESS FROM THE CLOUD

Cloud-stored data costs have a direct relationship to the accessibility and retrieving of that data.

If you rarely need the data and can afford to wait a dozen hours or more for the recovery—then choose a “deep-storage” or “cold storage” solution. If you simply need more physical storage and intend regular daily or weekly access—then you select a “near term” (probably not an archive) storage solution. Options include On-Prem (limited storage, rapid accessibility) or off-prem in a Co-Located (Co-Lo) storage environment, referred to as a “private-cloud” or alternatively a “public” (or commercial) cloud provider such as Google, Azure, AWS, IBM or others.

Cloud services continue to grow in usage and popularity, yet, there remains a degree of confusion as to “which kind of cloud service” to deploy and for which “kinds of assets.” Many users prefer regular access to their “archived” material—this would be a wrong approach and is more costly (as much as 4:1) than putting their data into deep-or cold-storage vs. a short-term environment (“a temporary storage bucket”) that is easily accessible.

Fig. 1 shows a “hybrid” managed solution with local cache, multiple cloud storage providers, and local/on-prem primary archive serviced by an object-based storage “bucket” manager. The concept allows migration, protection, and even retention of existing storage subsystems.

CHOICES AND DECISIONS

Picking cloud service providers for your archive is no easy decision—comparisons in services and costs can be like selecting a gas or electricity provider. Plans change, sometimes often. Signing onto a deep archive becomes a long-term commitment due primarily to the cost of retrieving the data despite the initial ‘upload’ costs being much lower. If your workflows demand continual data migration, don’t pick a “deep” or “cold-storage” plan; look at another near-line solution. Be wary of long-term multi-year contracts—cloud vendors are very competitive, offering advantages that can adjust annually.

The amount of data you’re to store will continually grow. Be selective about the types of data stored, the duration you expect to keep that data, and choose wisely as to ‘what’ is really needed. Your organization’s policies may dictate “store everything,” so know what the legal implications are, if any.

Carefully look at the total cost of ownership (TCO) in the platform, then weigh the long-term vs. short-term model appropriately.

Karl Paulsen is CTO at Diversified and a SMPTE Fellow. He is a frequent contributor to TV Technology, focusing on emerging technologies and workflows for the industry. Contact Karl atkpaulsen@diversifiedus.com.

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. 

RIO DE JANEIRO—Launched in 2012, Fox Sports Brasil has taken the lead in bringing world-class sports to as many viewers as possible, and has quickly become a top sports broadcaster in Brazil. We own rights to several exclusive sporting events, including the 2018 FIFA World Cup—which set new viewership records for the channel.

With such a massive amount of content to broadcast, and viewers wanting to access this content across a variety of platforms, we needed a sophisticated archiving technology solution that could help meet this demand—one that would be easy to manage and have enough capacity to hold our increasing collection of sports footage. Beyond that, we also needed to improve our ability to find content in our archives. Given the growing demand, generating new content through archive footage had become just as important as delivering live sports.

However, in looking to deliver this footage, finding the right content proved to be nearly impossible. Luckily, a good portion of our archive content was on YouTube, and we found that the ability to search historical video footage on YouTube was good enough to yield adequate results. Unfortunately, the quality of this footage was rather poor since it had been formatted multiple times for different platforms. It didn’t take long to realize we needed to find a better way.

THREE CRITERIA

We determined three criteria our ideal solution would meet. First, it had to be able to not only enrich the metadata of our numerous ingest streams, but also scan and enrich the archives. Next, it needed to be appropriately automated and simple to manage. Finally, the entire workflow had to remain on-premise, due to security concerns about moving our archive into the cloud, and cost considerations of frequently retrieving data. We settled on an artificial intelligence (AI) solution, since AI can be used to enrich volumes of metadata through cognitive engine processing.

After an extensive review, it became clear that Quantum provided the only option that met all of our criteria, including leveraging AI. The Quantum team—working with Seal Broadcast & Content—built a hybrid-cloud AI platform based on Quantum’s Xcellis storage appliance. This AI solution connects transparently to StorNext, Quantum’s file system for protecting, preserving and accessing rich media content.

We can now easily index and access 60,000 hours of archived content and live programming, and the AI-enabled workflow allows us to search content more rapidly to meet aggressive production deadlines.

A BETTER BROADCAST BUSINESS

The business impacts of the new solution have been immense. We can more quickly find the archived footage we need. And now that the entire archive is searchable, we’re constantly finding more relevant and compelling footage. And last but not least, the end product is of much higher quality. Ultimately, Quantum’s StorNext-based Xcellis on-premise solution has enabled us to be more agile, cost-effective and productive, and has gotten viewers across Brasil even more engaged with their sports content.

Luis Santos, vice president of Engineering & Operations for Fox Sports Brasil has worked in the sports and entertainment industry since 1995. He moved to the Fox Network Group in 2011 to launch Fox Sports Brazil Channels. He can be reached atLuis.Santos@Fox.com.

For more information, please visitwww.quantum.comor call 800-667-6268.

WALNUT CREEK, CALIF.—XenData today announced a new service to migrate files stored on LTO tape cartridges to cloud storage.

The service sidesteps the need to maintain older generations of tape drives and systems by moving files to cloud storage, the company said.

“When you are keeping archived files for a decade or more, migration is a fact of life. Our new service takes the pain out of that process, allowing files to be indexed, analyzed and shared,” said XenData CEO Phil Storey.

Archive storage systems from XenData have migration capabilities built in that make it easy to move files from older generations of LTO to the newest LTO version or the cloud.

The company is now offering a service that uses these migration technologies to move content from LTO to the cloud. LTFS, Cache-A TAR, XenData TAR and Front Porch DIVA formats are supported. The service also provides for content to be re-organized and categorized before being migrated to AWS, Microsoft Azure or Wasabi public clouds.

Migrating content to the latest LTO formats, including 6 TB LTO-7 and 12 TB LTO-8 cartridges, is also available.

CHARLOTTE, N.C.—For the past four decades, Raycom Sports has produced collegiate sports content for syndicated and cable packages. In addition to our current partnership with the Atlantic Coast Conference (handling production for the conference’s Regional Sports Network and providing production services for ESPN’s upcoming ACC Network) we have also produced live mobile and documentary content for the Carolina Panthers, Blizzard Entertainment, The Basketball Tournament and Hot Wheels Monster Trucks Live. As Coordinating Producer, I have worked with our great staff and freelancers to produce Emmy-winning content for Raycom Sports since 2004.

We were recently presented with an exciting but daunting challenge to digitize our entire video library. While our current video workflow has been fully digital for multiple years, 40 years of content creation left a massive amount of invaluable historical assets on videotape. Our overall collection of nearly 40,000 tapes ranged from high definition formats like HDCAM and DVCPro to Betacam and 3/4 inch.

THE GOLF CHANNEL EXPERIENCE

We had to consider many factors when developing our solution. Off-site housing of a video library can be very effective with the appropriate budget, but it’s tougher for mid-sized production operations like ours. Since storage is a monthly cost in any remote library arrangement, all conversations about storing our video library elsewhere to lower expenses resulted in contingencies of lowering the quality of video archived or increasing the turnaround time for assets retrieved, and these concessions were unacceptable or too cumbersome.

So how best to store these new digital assets locally? Having utilized XDCAM cartridges since our jump to high definition, we had witnessed first-hand the durability and read/write speed benefits of Sony’s disc-based solutions. That experience, combined with the massive Optical Disc Archive (ODA) workflow implemented by the Golf Channel, among others, demonstrated that massive asset libraries could be stored locally without using data tape. Having also seen the Carolina Panthers implement the ODA solution, we were convinced ODA was the best fit for all of our production needs.

Thanks primarily to the tireless efforts of our Production/Archive Manager, Rob Chorney, Raycom Sports has digitized over 20,000 videotapes as of Dec. 1, 2018. The material digitized, which is comprised of ACC football and basketball games since 1983, represents about 85 percent of our Atlantic Coast Conference content and about 60 percent of our overall library. Our Sony Optical Disc Archive PetaSite implementation consists of three chassis housing 190 slots of ODA storage and four Gen2 drives. This footprint gives us over 600 TBs of storage in our active repository. Masstech’s Flashnet middleware allows editors working within our Avid Media Central environment to archive and retrieve assets from within the Avid GUI, providing editing efficiency. Additionally, having assets more readily available for distribution has increased our video licensing revenue.

We are extremely pleased with the PetaSite system and its potential for scalability. With the coming release of Gen3 technology, I am confident our video library will be securely housed by Sony for years to come.

Alex Farmartino is coordinating producer at Raycom Sports. A 14-time MidSouth Emmy winner, he has worked since 2004 in live mobile broadcast and documentary production. He can be reached atafarmartino@raycomsports.com.

Find out more athttps://pro.sony/ue_US/.

Media & Entertainment companies around the world face the same problem: how best to archive an ever-increasing number of video assets in a way that’s affordable, accessible and secure. This webinar examines the benefits and limitations of three popular archiving strategies and how they are being deployed to meet the archiving and disaster recovery needs of media companies. Discussion will cover:

• Pros and cons of archiving media in a public cloud and on LTO tape
• How hybrids may be the right strategy for some media enterprises
• Critical factors of archiving options for M&E businesses
• Real-world media archiving and disaster recovery projects
• How station groups of all sizes can begin archiving local content affordably

Click Here to Register

Date: Wednesday, December 12, 2018

Time: 02:00 PM Eastern Standard Time

Duration: 1 hour

Leading this year’s recurring themes and category catch-phrases were the inevitable and overworked IP and Cloud, followed closely by Workflow Orchestration, Virtualization and relative newcomer Artificial Intelligence, all well-intentioned to automate the routine, liberate creativity, and enable deeper-than-ever dives into metadata, both for content and—shades of George Orwell—its consumers.

MASTER CONTROL AUTOMATION & CHANNEL PLAYOUT

AVECO debuted Ad Juggler, an ad revenue optimization tool for live sports coverage. A single key-press instantaneously executes an “alternate list” video/graphic sponsorship when a peak audience-interest play occurs; events post to the as-run for traffic and billing reconciliation.

BITCENTRAL showcased Central Control with multiple redundancy modes and Join-in-Progress updates, plus enhanced user-interface efficiency with multichannel control and customizable maps to aggregate and view remotely managed channels.

BROADSTREAM introduced Media Exchange for transcoder-free PitchBlue and Pathfire file acquisition and native playout. Also, CompuSat integration for off-satellite recording, and closed-caption display within its OASYS Browser.

CINEGY brought v12 of Air, Desktop, and Capture, plus Multiviewer v14. Desktop added real-time access to live feeds and its Archive MAM content. Included tools support logging, editing, post-production, news, and import/export to non-linear editing and automation.

CRISPIN unveiled a Sonybased Disaster Recovery solution via its RapidPlayX Web GUI. The Cloud-native playlist software offers on-premises and virtual deployment flexibility for stations to stay on-air when their ground facility’s off-line. Also, user feedback-based Join-in-Progress enhancements.

DNF CONTROLS unveiled its Live Cloud Playout collaboration with AWS. Thirdparty automation “sees” its GTP-32 controller as a local server channel, although content is remote on Amazon S3, and updates status as clips are added or removed. Also GTP-V1, a new software-only virtual IP controller for video/KVM routers, switchers, multiviewers, servers, tally systems, and more regardless of physical location.

ENCO announced NewTek Network Device Interface (NDI) support for IP video, plus a new ClipBoard interface for its Media Operations Manager (MOM) playout automation. Also, live input cut-ins without external switcher and support for SCTE-35 triggers and CEA-608/708 Closed Caption pass-through.

EVERTZ featured OvertureRT-LIVE workflow integration with iPowow, a social media aggregator and moderator, to enhance the viewer experience through real-time interaction with favorite shows.

FLORICAL partnered with Harmonic to debut FéniX, a scalable automation/playout package for simple channel to highyield enterprise configurations. Acuitas, its COTS hardware channel-in-a-box platform, added SAN environment capabilities for greater channel scalability.

GRASS VALLEY unveiled its SAM-merged automation range: iTX Flex, a Cloudbased SaaS solution for rapid channel spin-up; iTX Integrated Platform, software-based SD, HD or UHD playout with HDR support; and iTX On-Demand for VOD workflows. Complementing them: Multi-channel/screen Morpheus for on-premises, virtualized or multifacility operations, and ICE (Integrated Channel Playout), now supporting graphic templates with dynamic realtime data.

HARMONIC expanded its media processing family with VOS SW Cluster software and VOS 360 SaaS. Both support Cloud and bare metal environments to speed OTT deployment and channel migrations with greater flexibility and lower cost-per-channel.

IMAGINE COMMUNICATIONS added “Vizrt Inside” graphics to Versio, its Cloud-native, microservices-based playout platform, plus version redundancy, geo-zone back-up synchronization, and Adobe Acrobat integration.

NVERZION debuted Aramyst to automate syndicated content acquisition, prep and playout from PitchBlue and Pathfire; also announced, a Utah Scientific partnership combining their master control offerings under the brand “Uinta.”

PEBBLE BEACH added low-latency NDI confidence monitoring for live, reactive channels, plus 3D graphics integration with Pixel Power and Ross for Orca, its virtualized IP solution for scalable playout using private or public Cloud infrastructure.

PIXEL POWER showcased the addition of NewTek’s NDI technology to its Stream-Master integrated playout platform to generate and monitor low latency proxies. The company also demonstrated Gallium Workflow Orchestration to automate adding/removing graphics, branding, content packaging and regionalization; and GalliumVOD for OTT, catch-up and multiplatform services.

PRIMESTREAM debuted IP stream ingest and transcoding, a SaaS-based Review and Approval system, 4K/UHD end-to-end workflows, a centralized configuration module, and public APIs for Xchange.

RUSHWORKS unveiled A-List Streamster, IP-based desktop scheduling and playback automation for Internet channels, with URL and NDI input/output support for YouTube and similar outlets.

NEWSROOM SYSTEMS & WORKFLOWS

AVID brought multiple Cloud-centric journalist apps to its MediaCentral platform, including: “Publish,” to repurpose on-air content for Web and social media; “Rundown,” for live news production; “Research,” news feed and social media consolidation; and “Maestro News,” to facilitate graphic workflows.

BITCENTRAL launched FUEL, designed to dynamically stream and monetize viewer-personalized news content, while boosting engagement and ad impressions. Fuel incorporates the necessary tools to version, upload, and publish to digital audiences anywhere. The company also highlighted functionality updates throughout its newsroom workflow, including multiple third-party integrations, enhanced Oasis collaboration, and heightened security.

DALET showcased smart journalist modules powered by Media Cortex, part of its Galaxy AI framework. Content Discovery creates contextual recommendations with auto-content tagging, topic extraction, and key phrase searches; Social Media Framework lets editorial teams harvest, analyze, produce and deliver fast-paced news with popularity tracking and an aggregator tool to identify and follow threads.

GRASS VALLEY augmented its newsroom workflows with social media tools for STRATUS 6.0; enhanced video, IT and cloud-based asset management in Momentum; and v11 of its Ignite newscast production automation with upgraded Event Builder, third-party switcher support, and editing via SAM’s Go!, Rio or Grass’s EDIUS.

ENCO showed advanced ENPS, Avid and Octopus plug-ins and a new MOS interface for its Media Operations Manager (MOM) playout platform. Journalists can search asset libraries within their NRCS interface to add graphics, audio or video to scripts; rundowns auto-synchronize and are controllable via MOS for play-to-air.

OCTOPUS featured v8.2 of its eponymous NRCS. Among enhancements: collaborative scripting, faster rundown editing with clip replacement and in/out point modification, plus direct posting to social media and new story slug shortcuts.

TRAFFIC, BUSINESS & RIGHTS MANAGEMENT

BROADVIEW SOFTWARE rolled-out Version 8, with tools for linking series, seasons and episodes; expanded live event metadata management; upgraded auto-promo placement; enhanced secondary event and ad break functionality; and streamlined workflows to create and publish bulk program content.

IMAGINE COMMUNICATIONS debuted xG Scorecard. Blending input from sales and traffic, operational databases, social media, ratings and more across the enterprise, it empowers media executives to organize, navigate, interpret and draw real-time insights from their data.

MYERS introduced Console, a Cloud-enabled single point-of-entry to the ProTrack suite with enhanced security and multi-factor authentication. Also, ProTrack’s transition to browser front-end with advanced sales capabilities and interactive scheduling grid, and a significant update to ProWeb scheduling.

OPERATIVE (formerly SintecMedia) released an open API and ContentDNA, a machine learning algorithm within OnTarget forecasting to its Cloud-based AOS sales, traffic, and content management ecosystem. Also, new alliances with MediaOcean and Freewheel, among others.

WIDEORBIT launched Cloud Analytics, a streamlined SaaS edition of its flagship business intelligence solution that lowers implementation costs, yet retains its powerful dashboards, integrated traffic data, and mobile access for improved sales and financial decision-making.

ARCHIVE & MEDIA ASSET MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS

AVID demonstrated On Demand, a Cloud-based SaaS platform to securely manage and deliver content to any device, anywhere, while automating transformation and QC tasks. Also, new AI Suite creates searchable rich metadata libraries, applying machine learning and cognitive services to content indexing, closed caption verification, scene and facial recognition, and speech-to-text conversion.

DALET introduced Galaxy five, the latest edition of its asset management and workflow orchestration platform. The new version adds AI across the workflow, hybrid infrastructures with on-premises and cloud deployments, and a core emphasis on social media.

EVERTZ showcased third-party integrations with Mediator-X, its Cloud-enabled asset management platform, including a file-based QC solution from Interra Systems; automated closed caption and video description verification, alignment and language identification with Avid|Illuminate; and scalable object storage with Cloudian HyperStore.

MASSTECH introduced its “Metadata Mining” concept: a framework to relay archive or production content to third-party AI services to create metadata such as voice-to-text, facial, object or location recognition, even sentiment recognition that can be converted into searchable metadata linked to specific stored assets, thereby expanding potential content discovery and monetization.

PRIME FOCUS TECHNOLOGIES added work order automation modules to its CLEAR Media ERP, including a Content Acquisition Portal to manage, evaluate, cata-logue and schedule; OTT Distribution for multi-platform VOD publishing; and Ingest for Satellite & Terrestrial Distribution for centralized capture, prep, QC and automated delivery to station master controls.

SONY announced full integration between Media Backbone NavigatorX and its Ci Media Cloud Platform, plus Avid and Adobe edit integration; HTML5 apps to ingest, organize, manage, and search across multiple departments and locations; and an Optical Disc Archive collaboration with Qualstar to develop an enterprise-class library system.

TEDIAL debuted AI-based SMARTLIVE, a metadata engine and production support tool for sports and live events. It automatically builds logs, player grids and schedules, captures actual multi-camera or multi-venue content, and creates highlight clips based on actions, keywords or logged occurrences for live production enhancement, archive, or publication to social media.

TMD showed Media-flex-UMS Orchestrator with third-party device controls and business system integrations for simple-to-complex software-defined workflows that adapt automatically based on metadata values. Companion Composer’s workflow designs may be cloned and edited in-house without programmers or costly professional services.

TVU NETWORKS unveiled its cloud-based MediaMind, consisting of Contribution Automation, AI Engine, Producer Pro, plus Real-Time Search and Workflow Engines. It precisely indexes video from the start of production based on AI-generated metadata, enabling production workgroups to efficiently locate and interact with content.

VERIZON DIGITAL MEDIA SERVICES featured Path Monitoring for OTT, part of Volicon Media Intelligence, with end-to-end delivery chain visibility, including a “what aired” video affidavit. It simultaneously monitors, logs and records baseband or transport stream feeds to confirm content integrity across geo-separated locations.

VSN showed Explorer MAM with new auto-metadata detection using IBM, Google or Microsoft Azure integration to obtain real-time insights from content via facial and brand recognition, keywords, speakers, objects, and more. Explorer now includes Wedit (web-based editor) enabling users to edit videos and export EDLs from any location.

XYECH revealed new features for its MediaPulse facility management, including Azure PaaS support, Change Control for Approval Workflows, Personnel Entitlements and Payroll Penalties in Schedule Book, and Auto-Assign Resource.

SWITCHERS/VISION MIXING

BLACKMAGIC DESIGN launched ATEM Television Studio Pro 4K, an all-in-one live UHD switcher with integrated hardware control panel featuring eight independent 12G-SDI inputs, built-in Fair-light audio mixer, ATEM Advanced Chroma Keyer, multi-view, flash-based media players, creative transitions, DVE, and more.

BROADCAST PIX released a dual-channel BPfusion CG software option for its BPswitch production series. It streamlines data-intensive graphics creation via built-in NewBlueNTX multilayer 3D motion CG and auto-updates with IP-based scoreboard, Twitter, RSS, spreadsheet, and similar sports, election, and news data.

EVS debuted X-ONE, an all-in-one live production system with software-defined technology for small to mid-sized events. An intuitive touchscreen interface enables solo operators to create replays, control audio, mix video sources, and add graphics over live content with high quality broadcast-standard output.

FOR-A unwrapped a new 4K 3 M/E model for its HVS-6000 switcher platform with a maximum 64 inputs/48 outputs in 12G-SDI and 12RU, Designed for users upgrading from HD to full 4K, it’s future-scalable to 8K.

GRASS VALLEY introduced K-Frame X, which uses existing K-FRM boards plus a new 192x96 I/O video production engine. It supports TICO compression or uncompressed SMPTE ST-2110 4K, along with HDR, and operates from any GV Kayenne, Karrera or Korona switcher panel.

JLCOOPER ELECTRONICS upped its Proton and Ion switcher control surfaces with front panel input mapping, Hall-effect T-Bar, GPI-input, and QuickSwitch to support multiple Blackmagic ATEMs.

NEWTEK unveiled NDI 3.5–its widely accepted interface protocol–with performance, network connectivity, and device discovery enhancements. Flagship TriCaster gained LiveGraphics with real-time motion and dynamic, data-driven text and imagery via Adobe Photoshop or After Effects, and without needing proprietary hardware.

ROSS VIDEO launched Carbonite Black Solo13, a compact 13-in/6-out switcher and hardware panel combo. Acuity gained Floating 3D DVE; 2020 WCG HDR Conversion on Input and Output Processing Boards with HLG, PQ and Slog3 support; audio on the Global Store; and enhanced Custom Controls. Carbonite v13 added DashBoard Virtual-Panel; input/output Color Corrector and proc amp controls; color temperature presets; Any Bus Follow, and more.

RUSHWORKS updated its VDESK Radio/TV Production System with 3n1 multi-function PTZ camera and TALK-TAKE voice-activated, hands-off switching between host and guests.

SONY unveiled the XVS-9000, an advanced live switcher for 4K, HD and HDR content productions with up to 80-inputs/40-outputs in 4K or 160-inputs/80-outputs in HD, plus IP, 12G-SDI in 4K, and hybrids of both for large sporting and entertainment programming.

ROUTING

EVERTZ debuted the XRF4, a modular RF router with hot-swappable rear panels, 64x128 matrix, direct fiber-optic inputs, and control/monitoring touch-screen.

FOR-A launched the MFR-6000 SD/HD/3G/6G/12G, a router with 12G-SDI compatibility across a matrix of up to 144-in/outputs plus 4K and 8K support. A built-in Web server simplifies setup and it can be integrated within an SNMP system to monitor operational states, I/O signals, and cross-point status.

GRASS VALLEY introduced v1.5 of Convergent, its SDI/IP router with familiar interface to visualize IP network bandwidth; it supports SDN and IGMP, as well as audio breakaway, shuffling and AES profile conversion. Also new, the Sirius 840 Enterprise, a router with integrated MV 850 multi-viewer with support for SDI, AES, MADI, 4K UHD, IP and 12G, 840 with integral audio/video processing.

ROSS VIDEO debuted the Ultrix-FR5, a 5RU, 144x144 routing/AV processing platform featuring SD to 12G, clean/quiet switching, audio embedding/de-embedding, and up to 24 MultiViewers with 100 PIPs per head.

UTAH SCIENTIFIC unveiled a pass-through card for its 400 Series 2/3 routers or standalone operation. It converts SDI to IP while keeping the original SDI for use elsewhere. Twelve 3G/HD/SD signals can be switched in SDI with simultaneous IP copies (2022 or 2110) fed to IP fabric, easing the migration to IP-based workflows.

KVM SWITCHES

ADDER TECHNOLOGY introduced the ALIF100T, a dongle-sized USB power-capable KVM, part of its ADDER-Link INFINITY series. The diminutive unit consumes a quarter the power of conventional rack units yet delivers up to 1920x1200@60Hz via DVI or DisplayPort interface.

BLACK BOX debuted its Emerald Unified KVM Platform, a converged solution to distribute video, audio, and peripheral signals in hybrid environments, including IP and proprietary direct-connect networks, with mixed resolutions up to UHD/4K and beyond.

G&D NORTH AMERICA unwrapped a KVM-over-IP matrix with dynamic access, secure AES-128 encrypted operation, and control room functionality for monitoring, scripting and scenario-switching.

IHSE launched the Draco ultra-491 Series, HDMI extenders that pass video over long distances without quality loss in simple point-to-point applications or combined with enterprise or compact matrix switches. It can extend HDMI up to 10 kilometers over fiber or 140 meters usingCat-X cables. Digital audio options include AES/EBU and S/PDIF up to 96 kilohertz.

THINKLOGICAL introduced the TLX Client Integration module, a virtual machine processor and KVM extender offering secure, uncompressed signal management without adding latency, artifacts or dropped-frames. It’s deployable point-to-point or in-conjunction with a matrix switch for multi-source/destination connectivity in collaborative workflows.

DENVER—Wazee Digital won’t be needing to borrow a friend’s password to have access to HBO as the company is now working with the premium cable network to archive its sports content.

The Wazee Digital Core platform is being implemented to digitize and archive HBO sports content that is currently stored on videotape formats. The conversion will allow HBO to preserve this deteriorating content while also providing access to the archive for stakeholders that need the content.

Core is a software-as-a-service platform built for the cloud. Core can manage complex tasks of video acquisition, workflow, universal access, metadata management and automated delivery. In addition, Core provides cloud storage that can scale with the size of a digital library.

[Wazee Digital Finds Spot in College Football Playoff]

To ensure the digital preservation of HBO’s analog and digital videotape formats, Core is using AS-02 MXF versioning. HBO’s MXF-wrapped assets serve as master files that can accommodate input and output formats, while flexible metadata support aids in search and discovery.

Credentialed internal HBO users and other stakeholders now have access to Core to search, explore and download content from the archive.

Part of a day-long symposium on the vital and complex subject of archiving and preserving data for the entertainment industry, Monday's opening sessions began with a challenging keynote from Daniel Teruggi that addressed the topic with a sweeping perspective.

Teruggi, the director of France's INA (Institut National de l'Audiovisuel), is also coordinator of the FP6 European project PrestoSpace, an initiative to develop technology for digital preservation, and the FP7 European project PrestoPRIME, dedicated to the long-term preservation of digital audiovisual content. He is a member of the Europeana project and Foundation and general secretary of the International Federation of Audiovisual Archives (FIAT/IFTA).

Teruggi placed preservation of data in an historical context, starting out with the oral transmission of songs and stories, leading to the mechanical creation of instruments and early forms of musical notation to recording, starting in the 19th century and electroacoustic composition starting in the mid-20th century.

His point—one that was key to the symposium—was that preserving creative content, such as a piece of music, is about more than storing something away. "The general problem is not to conserve," he said. "It is to be capable, after any period of time, to perform the piece of music again."

There are preserved instruments from ancient Greece, along with examples of scores, Teruggi said, "but nobody can play them. The weak point is the 'encoding system.' We don't know how to read the music. Preservation of the music must be oriented towards restitution."

He concluded that those interested in preserving any kind of audio and/or visual content must focus on ensuring that in this changing technological landscape, we take steps to guarantee that today's data remains intelligible in the future. Teruggi stressed that as the encoding technology gets increasingly complex, it becomes imperative to develop processes for archiving digital objects that includes contents, documentation and relations with other objects. And he speculates that perhaps digital objects could, at some point, be responsible for their own preservation and migration to future formats.

After the conclusion of this theoretical, historical and thought-provoking look at preservation, Hewlett Packard's Steve Wong, director of business development, Media & Entertainment, led a discussion with Mike Acton, engineering director at Insomniac Games and Eric Kaltman, project manager, IMLS-funded Game and Metadata Citation Project, about how these concepts impact the gaming industry today.

The gaming world arguably presents more complexity than any other entertainment arena when it comes to preservation and restoration. Games are designed for specific platforms that change and evolve quickly. The specific capabilities of the game are designed at the coding level to make the most of a particular platform. The enormous quantity of audio and visual assets is built using contemporary state-of-the-art toolsets that will soon be obsolete.

"Any game has millions of source files," said Acton, noting the challenges involved in preservation. "There are textures, animations, all of that, and it is all created on third-party applications—[Adobe] Flash, Illustrator, Photoshop. If we go back more than five years, do the tools exist? Is there anybody who is still proficient on them? Is there metadata about how to use them? And if so, how do you stitch that all together? [Games] are encoded in some form, but even how that is done varies by the studio."

In Acton's world, anything more than five years old is long term, and attempting to preserve a game "long term" adds orders of magnitude to the difficulty. "If someone is trying to [restore] assets from 10 years ago," he admitted, "they're dealing with versions of software like [Microsoft] Windows and [Autodesk] Maya that the costs become very high."

A question from the audience asked whether the motion picture and television industries, as they face similar challenges, could find a way to team up with the gaming world to work on creating a set of standards that might at least make some of the issues described above more manageable going forward.

Acton responded that such ideas have been discussed, but it has so far been difficult for the interested parties to agree on what precisely the standards would achieve: What would a "translation" for tomorrow's platform of a game built today look like? How would the user interact with it? And it's not easy to come up with specs for a standard without some consensus about those types of larger questions.

Closing the session on a hopeful note, Wong said: "We in gaming might need to take a step in that direction."

TORONTO & SIMI VALLEY, CALIF.—Workflow and media asset management system provider Masstech has partnered with data storage manufacturer Qualstar on a new LTO tape-based archiving technology.

Qualstar’s tape libraries are now interoperable with MassStore technology that powers all Masstech media management systems. Qualstar’s LTO-7 tape technology is specifically highlighted for its ability to meet the needs of media and entertainment customers. All Qualstar libraries are offered with all tape slots fully licensed and available.

Combined installations of Qualstar and Masstech installations are already in use in television network and newsroom environments.

ALEXANDRIA, VA—The cloud continues to be hyped as an ideal environment for long-term video storage, but at this year’s NAB several technological advances suggest that cartridge and optical storage solutions will remain viable options for archiving of video. This is because capacity has remained just one part of the greater equation when it comes to storage.

“The biggest issues for most media and entertainment houses with third-party archiving is cost and trust,” said Thomas Coughlin, data storage consultant. “Above a certain scale of archive it can be more economical to buy and support storage infrastructure rather than to lease that infrastructure from a third party.”

At the 2016 NAB Show, For-A introduced the LTS-70, an LTO-7 open standards linear tape server that can store up to 6TB of data. The issue of trust is being dealt with using encryption, added Coughlin, but he noted that that there are still some lingering doubts about long-term security.

The other factor is one of cost, and here is where these new advances can be seen to have notable advantages over the cloud, especially when discussing cold storage or content that is not accessed very often and where higher latency is acceptable.

“For these applications the cost of storage is more important than the performance of the storage,” added Coughlin. “As a consequence, slower access storage technologies such as optical discs, magnetic tape and hard disk drives are generally used, rather than the faster SSDs.”

Optical discs and magnetic tape also have lower operating costs since the media does not use power unless it is actively used.

“However, they also have somewhat higher latency due to robotic media access in a robotic library system,” noted Coughlin. “Hence we might use HDDs for ‘warm’ archives and optical discs or magnetic tape for ‘cold’ archives.”

TO THE TAPE
Linear Tape-Open (LTO), a magnetic tape data storage technology, continues to be a viable option for archiving of video, as was noted by last year’s announcements of the LTO-7 specifications. This latest generation of LTO offered backward compatibility to LTO-6 and 5 cartridges, while an LTO-7 drive can write data to both generation 7 and 6 cartridges. This archival system has also realized 15TB capacity, double from the previous generation.

“The increase in storage is very important but so is the backward compatibility,” said Shawn Brume, business line executive for data protection and retention at IBM, one of the principal supporters of the LTO format. “Our customers will be able to keep this around for 100 years and can retrieve this data without extraordinary efforts.”

LTO-7 will also be able ensure that backups of content can be made quickly as LTO-7 offers 300MB per second record times. “You can literally stream 8K to the LTO drive,” added Brume. “Just as you can stream it you can create an archived copy.”

This tape-based technology now offers other advantages that make it seem a lot less like tape.

“This includes partitioning as well as dragging and dropping like a disc-based storage system,” explained Laura Loredo, worldwide marketing product manager at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “This has provided a new application for tape, and makes it a very cost-effective solution for archiving.”

The backers of LTO have also laid out a roadmap through its 10th generation that will see the format offering up to 120TB of compressed video.

VENDORS ON BOARD
At this year’s NAB Show, broadcast video and audio technology vendor For-A introduced the LTS-70, a LTO-7 open standards linear tape server that can store up to 6TB of data, along with its latest multi-codex archiving recorder, the LTR-200HS7.

The LTS-70 is a filed based device that doesn’t record video, according to Jay Shinn, vice president of For-A Americas. “But it is ideal for our customers who want to ensure that archival material on cartridge instead of in the cloud. It is a cost-effective solution, as LTO-7 cartridges are around $125.”

This LTO server allows LTO tape files to be read and written, while also offering backwards compatibility on the network via FTP, and also accepts high-speed interfaces including 10G Ethernet or USB 3.1. It can also throughput large amounts of data including 4K video, and can simultaneously write to both LTO and hard disk drives.

For-A’s LTR-200HS7 operates as a standalone video recorder with video input, encoding, backup/archiving to LTO tape and video output.

“This is very much for baseband video,” added Shinn. “It looks like a tape machine and operates like one. These devices offer the best of both worlds, as it provides a physical media that you can walk down the hall or still allow users in the production facility to do a file transfer and retain media while still putting it on the cloud.”

XenData also used the recent NAB Show to introduce its DX-240 near-line disk array system, which provides continuous backup to LTO-7 cartridges. The unit further supports network attached storage (NAS) architecture so that files can be stored on high-performance RAID arrays while simultaneously being written to a direct-attached LTO-7 library.

“It is super economical if you want to take your cart offline,” said Phil Storey, CEO of XenData. “It does take a while to restore if you urgently need the restored content, but it is faster than most cloud-based solutions.”

It can also ensure multiple backups, added Storey. “NAS is a great way to have easy access to the content, but you are vulnerable and could lose everything in a fire or flood. This ensures you have a backup of the content.”

Earlier this year Panasonic announced that it had developed “freeze-ray,” an optical disc-based data archive system in collaboration with social media giant Facebook. The ability to backup to a cartridge can also make it easy, and affordable, to share that data with other production facilities or locations in cases where time is not of the essence.

“FedEx makes a low-cost way to move large amounts of content, and it is a safe way to transport a second version of that content,” noted Storey. “Most customers aren’t actually using it to transport content, but the option is there. It is a reliable way to ensure the content is protected too.”

Because of the continuous backup functionality it ensures that the content is actually backed up.

“That is the weakest point, the time it takes to do a full backup of content, and this is why continuous backup is the way to go,” added Storey. “The other part of it is that content can’t be hacked because it is nearly impossible to overwrite content on tape.”

Last month, XenData introduced the SXL-6500, a highly scalable digital video archive system that is a turnkey, rackmount archive. It combines the SX0550 archive server with an Oracle SL150’s expandable robotic LTO-7 library.

When fully expanded it can accommodate up to 300 slots with near-line LTO capacity of 1,800TB, or 75,000 hours of HD video. Users can create a folder structure on the archive as if it were a disk-based server or disk-based NAS; and since it as an object storage interface, it is compatible with most media asset management systems including Avid Interplay, eMAM and MAMs from Apace, axle Video, Evertz, Dalet and Metus.

SEEING THE WAY TO OPTICAL
Tape won’t be the only archiving alternative to the cloud. LTO-7 will see competition from the second generation of the Optical Disc Archive System, which Sony and Panasonic jointly developed. It has also seen a significant increase in storage capacity, where a single cartridge can now offer 3.3TB of storage.

In addition, the Generation 2 version utilizes an 8-channel optical drive unit, which doubles the read/write speeds over the previous generation. This allows for it to accommodate 4K video in real time.

“It offers read speeds that peak at about 300 Mbps,” said Alan Gagliardotto, senior manager for product management at Sony. “The throughput is about 250 Mbps, so that’s faster than a pipe and more cost-effective.” The cost per gigabyte of the media is about four cents, but cost is just one factor that could make optical an attractive solution for video production facilities.

The shelf life is rated at 100 years, according to Ellen Heine, marketing manager at Sony Electronics. “It is a perfect solution for where you need to archive something for a long time. The media doesn’t need any special environmental conditions, and the discs are incredibly robust.”

It is a non-magnetic media as well, so it can’t easily be erased by accident, and secondary copies can easily be produced.

Earlier this year Panasonic announced that it had developed “freeze-ray,” an Optical Disc-Based Data Archive System in collaboration with social media giant Facebook. This solution was designed to reduce data center operating costs and energy use by providing optimal cold storage on familiar looking discs.

“This is 300 GB on a standard 5 1/2 inch disc that is the same size physically as a CD but can hold much more data,” said Bob Rauh, vice president of business development at Panasonic USA. “The roadmap for this archival disc will take us to 300GB to 500GB to 1TB and beyond within the next decade.”

Panasonic has continued to improve the density of the discs, which has meant putting more bits in a narrow tolerance but that has also helped read/write speeds.

Rauh said this solution provides a much lower cost than cloud-based options, but could also be a good part of a business continuity program.

“These discs are flood resilient and electro-magnetic resistant, while also being robust in many environments where other systems might fail,” Rauh added. “We have a 100-year longevity of discs even if it isn’t kept in pristine condition such as locations with high heat and humidity. We see our optical discs as a good solution to keep your data safe and secure.”

BERKSHIRE, ENGLAND—Marquis Broadcast and SGL are continuing their relationship with the integration of Marquis’ Project Parking Avid storage management system and SGL’s FlashNet content management system.

By combining Parking and Flashnet, facilities are able to archive and restore whole projects, according to Marquis; this includes all bins, sequences and media files. The Parking system creates complete copies of any Avid project and media onto the FlashNet storage.

Marquis is also currently offering a free download of Parking, which analyzes a facility’s shared storage and how it is being used. This free version will identify how much space projects are taking up and space wasted by orphan and duplicate media. The free version does not “park” projects. Users can download the free version at www.marquisbroadcast.com/sgl.

HOLLYWOOD, CALIF.—Shortly before the start of the SMPTE 2015 Annual Technical Conference & Exhibition, TV Technology spoke with S. Merrill Weiss about the upcoming track of sessions “Archiving the Future and the Future of Archiving” for which he is the session chair.

TV TECHNOLOGY: What is the future of archiving? How different does it look from what we envision today as “archiving,” i.e., a sort of a virtual library full of files.

 S. Merrill Weiss
S. MERRILL WEISS: Future archives are likely to be organized differently than they have been in the past. The trend already has begun toward “Object-Based” archives, as opposed to the storage of individual files as has been the practice previously. The issue with just storing files is that files that are related to one another, but of different content types, can end up in disparate locations, from which they can be difficult to retrieve when needed together. Examples of this phenomenon are files related to a single production project, which could have hundreds of thousands of image acquisition files representing individual frames, hundreds of audio acquisition files, a script in a word-processing document, a budget in a spreadsheet document, listings of props and locations in a database, binary applications to be broadcast along with the final production, and, of course, all of the files generated during post production in an array of versions. Archive Objects can collect all of the files from such a project and maintain their relationships to one another while storing them for both operational and long-term preservation purposes.

Another factor regarding future archives is that they will become much closer to what we consider to be operational storage today. There will be less differentiation between the two types of storage. Indeed, many productions today record for acquisition or post-production purposes directly to media intended for long-term storage. Doing so makes it easier to preserve all of the material created and collected as part of the production and post-production processes. The trend seems likely to continue and to accelerate.

Helping to facilitate the use of Archive Objects is a recently standardized approach developed within SMPTE called the Archive eXchange Format (AXF). AXF is a wrapper structure that enables archives to be independent of the hardware systems, operating systems, files systems and software applications on which they are created. That independence further enables archives to be recovered without the need for use of the original archive systems on which they were created. In fact, it permits recovery without the need for any archive system at all, thereby virtually eliminating the potential for orphaned archives. AXF already is seeing widespread use in the Media and Entertainment space and has the potential to extend to archiving applications of all sorts in all sorts of industries.

TVT: Will it be off-site? In the cloud?

WEISS: Future archiving is likely to be a mixture of on-site and off-site storage, with off-site and cloud storage becoming more widespread over time. Cloud storage, in particular, will depend on the use of Archive Objects to maintain relationships between files that are associated with one another as they are transferred from and recalled to producing, post-producing, and distribution locations and organizations. In fact, one of the trends in storage per se is the application of Object Storage in combination with geographic dispersal of data. Use of such techniques is facilitated by construction of Archive Objects specifically to enable streaming their data, which is the approach taken by AXF. It provides for the fastest transfer of files and their content between locations through whatever communication means happen to be applied.

TVT: With media companies creating multiple streams of content 24/7, will there have to be a systematic purge of archives?

WEISS: If anything, the trend is toward deleting less and less. With the plummeting cost of storage, it becomes more expensive to decide what is worth saving from what is not than it is just to save it all. Moreover, it is very difficult to know what will be of value in the future. With metadata bound to files and their content becoming simpler to establish and providing more relevant information about the content, appropriate matter for particular needs becomes easier to locate and recover from storage. The combination of these factors favors retention over elimination.

TVT: How important has the role of metadata become in archiving?

WEISS: As with so many aspects of media production and management, metadata has become critical in archiving. It is what allows the collection of files into Archive Objects. It is what allows the content of files to be known and selected. It holds all of the information needed for formal archival processes as needed for meaningful long-term preservation. A problem with the prevalence of metadata is that it is expensive to generate and collect. A consequence of this situation is that some content producers now are seeking to collect metadata on the set as content is created, in what have come to be called “digital birth certificates,” as a means of controlling the costs of metadata creation later. Work is under way in SMPTE to extend the AXF protocol to cover the needs of on-set creation of digital birth certificates, as it has been recognized by a number of producing organizations as a useful vehicle for providing the needed services.

S. Merrill Weiss is president of Merrill Weiss Group LLC and a consultant in electronic media technology and technology management. In a 46+ year career, he has spent more than 36 years involved in work on SMPTE standards. Merrill is a SMPTE Fellow and has received the SMPTE David Sarnoff Gold Medal and the Progress Medal. He also was a recipient of the NAB Television Engineering Achievement Award, the ATSC Bernard Lechner Outstanding Contributor Award, and the IEEE Matti S. Siukola Award.

LONDON – Used to being the one who hands out the gold medal, the International Olympic Committee is set to receive an award of its own at IBC2015 for its conservation and management its audiovisual archive of documents from past Olympic events.

Technicians examine transparencies from the photographic archive prior to conservation © CIO/Jean-Louis Strangis

The IOC has an archive featuring 2,000 hours of film, 33,000 hours of video, 8,500 hours of audio and more than 500,000 photographs dating back to the first modern day Olympics in 1896. According to IOC’s archivists, within a few years 50 percent of videos would be unplayable, 20 percent of the faded photographs would be unusable, and there would be no audio players available for a majority of the collection.

With the implementation of the Patrimonial Assets Management program and work from up to 40 specialists, the project took seven years of a combined 100,000 total work hours to cataloguing, indexing, scanning, digital cleaning and restoration.

 “This project is very important for two reasons,” said Michael Lumley, chair of the IBC Awards panel. “First, it ensures that more than a century of Olympic history is preserved for the future. But perhaps even more important, it draws the industry’s focus on a subject is all too easy to ignore.”

“Broadcasters, production companies and anyone with an audiovisual archive can look to the IOC’s Patrimonial Asset Management project to see a model of conservation and access,” Lumley continued. “IBC is pleased to be able to draw attention to this issue through this award, as well as recognizing the excellent work the IOC is undertaking.”

IBC2015 takes place from Sept. 10-15 in Amsterdam.