ROUND ROCK, Texas & STAMFORD, Conn.—NBC Olympics will be using Dell Technologies to provide high performance storage systems for its production of the Tokyo games. 

NBC Olympics will use the Dell EMC PowerScale family of storage systems to digitally store video content captured at the Tokyo Olympics for sharing with viewers in the United States. announced Darryl Jefferson, vice president, Broadcast Operations & Technology, NBC Olympics and Jeff Boudreau, president and general manager, Infrastructure Solutions Group at Dell Technologies. 

PowerScale, powered by Dell EMC OneFS software to easily unify storage clusters on a single intelligent file system, will store and manage petabytes of data—the equivalent of millions of gigabytes—across two NBC Olympics production locations in Japan and one remotely at its headquarters in the United States, the companies said. 

“Like the gifted athletes selected to compete in the Olympics for the ultimate glory, Dell Technologies is honored to have been chosen to help NBCUniversal bring the powerful stories of victory and defeat to viewers worldwide,” said Boudreau. “With Dell EMC PowerScale, NBC Olympics will reliably store and simply manage more than 7,000 hours of athletic heroics across its networks and streaming platforms while making the experience for those watching remotely better than ever.” 

“As we focus our lens on bringing athletes’ stories to our audience, the remarkable behind-the-scenes technological innovations involved in bringing those stories to life are crucial,” said Jefferson. “Dell EMC PowerScale storage takes seamless collaboration to a truly global scale with the geo-diverse teams that produce the NBC Olympics. The scalable and flexible storage enables teams to exchange video and other content for our multi-platform deliveries.” 

AMHERST, NY—ATTO Technology today announced a collaboration with Dell EMC that enables LTO SAS tape library sharing via Ethernet networks.

With the aid of ATTO XstreamCORE ET 8200 storage controllers, it is possible to connect Dell EMC ML3 tape libraries to Ethernet, enabling new architectures and workflow possibilities, the company said.

“Adding Ethernet connectivity to Dell EMC ML3 tape libraries allows greater flexibility in data access, backup routines and in physically locating the hardware,” said Timothy Klein, president and CEO of ATTO Technology. “We’re excited to join with Dell in offering a backup and archive solution that’s not only cost-effective but gives customers more freedom than they’ve ever had with this type of hardware."

ATTO XstreamCORE ET 8200 is an accelerated hardware protocol converter. It connects Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) LTO tape drives to Ethernet networks via iSCSI, the company said.

Dell EMC ML3 LTO tape solutions provide secure backups that can be automated on a schedule suiting specific workflows, it said.

XstreamCORE ET 8200-Dell EMC ML3 combos are available exclusively through Dell EMC.

For more information, visit the ATTO Technology website.

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA—In the ever-changing landscape of sports broadcasting, meeting the technical requirements for state-of-the-art 4K live sports production is a complex challenge to say the least.

At Fox Sports Australia, we wanted to transform our business toward a new 4K digital era so we needed a storage platform that could support a first-of-its-kind 4K live workflow by providing extreme performance and scalability for live video ingest and highlights-editing, stretching from the live venue to our production facility.

SUMMER OF CRICKET IN 4K

In advance of our 4K Live project covering a summer of cricket, we wanted to test the limits of the Isilon all-flash F800 model. We’ve been using Dell EMC Isilon scale-out network-attached-storage (NAS) as our core media production storage for many years, so with our broadcast production partners at NEP Australia, we chose Dell EMC Isilon F800 all-flash storage to support our production of live sports in 4K UHD video resolution.

After integration testing with EVS and Adobe Premiere Pro, we were very happy with the storage performance and consistency.

With our cricket content broadcast on a new dedicated Foxtel 4K channel, this scale-out NAS solution will allow the Foxtel channel to broadcast in 4K resolution at twice the frame rate of Foxtel’s HD channels—making for smooth, high-quality reproduction of fast-moving live sports action as it happens, when it happens.

To do so requires a quadruple-increase in throughput of live-capture video streams, which of course means updates to the existing production storage and network architecture.

PRODUCTION CHAIN

Fox Sports Australia had to significantly boost its 4K live workflow, which called for ultra-high-speed storage capabilities for both the outside-broadcast (OB) and inside our central production facility.

Up to 30 cameras at the sporting venues capture content in 4K and HD, which is produced in the OB vans using EVS live production servers together with Isilon F800 IP-based storage mounted in flyaway cases. Video editors producing highlights and other packages use Adobe Premiere Pro working with 4K and HD clips directly connected to the Isilon F800. Further post-production and content repackaging takes place in real-time back at the Fox Sports Australia HQ. Clips from the OB van are also replicated back to Fox Sports using Isilon’s SyncIQ technology—which takes advantage of the high-bandwidth IP data network provided from the venue by Telstra Broadcast Services.

Clips created in EVS are synchronized from the venue to our production HQ as they are created. All clips are published and available in EVS IPDirector, IPWeb and Adobe Premiere Pro using IPLink. These clips can then be edited into packages for news and studio programs, broadcast on Foxtel and used for OTT delivery to mobile and web platforms.

A big reason for the success of the Isilon F800 all-flash is its ability to absorb both the high throughput and high concurrency associated with the project. This capability, delivered in just 4RU, allowed Isilon F800 systems to be deployed alongside the OB vans supplied by NEP Australia while also substantially reducing the data center rack space, power and cooling needed at Fox Sports headquarters.

Fox Sports has been working with Dell EMC since 2012, with Dell EMC deploying Isilon scale-out NAS storage solutions for its content creation and distribution workflows. The Isilon all-flash storage solution plays an integral role in the framework of the production industry. It’s signaling what’s to come with all- IP 4K content creation and delivery. The next-generation viewing experience is here—and watching live sport will never be the same again.

Robert Oliver is head of technology at Fox Sports Australia, where he has worked for nearly a decade. He can be reached atRobert.Oliver@foxsports.com.au.

For more information, visitwww.dellemc.comor call 866-438-3622.

“We don’t even know what we’ve got in our archive…”

Comments like this are all too common in the industry as media organizations have woken up to find their organically grown, sprawling content archives missing a key bit of information: metadata.

Television broadcasters and other owners of large content libraries are facing this problem due to the sheer volume of media assets locked up on data tape, with incomplete or idiosyncratic information about exactly what has been stored. Without complete and accurate metadata, it’s difficult to make decisions about the worth of a given media asset, and that makes content libraries difficult to monetize.

How many times have you heard of a film restoration archivist (while looking for something else) “finding” a supposedly lost asset in the vaults, and thus making a restoration project more complete, unique, newsworthy, etc.? Many media companies know all too well that the ability to store data versus its value are often misaligned. Companies have long been looking for tools to help drive value from assets that were created and acquired at great expense but that have become “lost” with little hope of being found.

DATA-DRIVEN CONTENT

Long ago (in internet time), we saw the rise of “big data,” and watched it become “analytics,” which has become “deep learning” (a refinement of machine learning), which is itself part of the catchall term called “artificial intelligence.”

But it’s all a variation on the same thing: performing algorithmic queries on deliberately acquired data about customers, products and services in order to yield actionable intelligence.

The media distribution business has embraced analytics. Successful media and entertainment distributors had to develop decisionmaking capabilities allowing them to respond rapidly to constant change, while also integrating rights, digital supply chain, web and social media data. This has helped distributors gain powerful insights about both their media assets and customers, which further informs the types of programming they are willing to invest in.

This use of analytics has opened a window into a critical link between customer preferences, monetization and what is in your media archive. In a recent study by Nielsen of the subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) consumer viewing habits, what’s driving 80 percent of the time spent viewing these services is the back catalog of content acquired by streaming services from television networks and studios. “…Our research shows most of the viewing time is spent with catalog programming,” said Nielsen’s COO Steve Hasker. In short, the content in media archives is driving the majority of the new and rapidly growing ways consumers are viewing media.

METADATA CREATING MONETIZATION

Creating metadata has typically been a manual process, where an informed and knowledgeable person can “tag” (or assign metadata to) a media asset, and armed with an appropriate taxonomy, standardize the description of the asset so that search techniques can be used with confidence.

But this approach doesn’t scale. There aren’t enough qualified people, let alone enough infrastructure to let users watch and tag content interactively. Further, video and audio need to be watched and listened to in real time, and there are literally thousands of years’ worth of material which may be trash—or treasure. No one will know without evaluating the asset.

Every rights holder has had to migrate their data—their companies’ precious capital assets—from an older medium to a newer one, simply to preserve its ability to be read in the future. This is a labor-and time-intensive process, which doesn’t add any intrinsic value to the media assets, but has to be done regardless. What if you could migrate your data once, add value to it as part of the migration, and then never need to migrate to another tape format again?

If you could “automagically” add metadata to your content archive—through a combination of AI techniques that watch and listen to your library content and build up a user-referenceable database of people, places, things, even sentiments—you would have the ability to create a new type of programming, where archival material could serve as context for current-day narratives much more easily than such programming is created today.

CONTENT AND THE RISE OF MACHINE LEARNING

As multiple sources of data proliferate within an organization, new AI and machine learning techniques evolve to make cross-correlations visible to departments that previously did not have visibility into this data. This promotes companies’ adoption of a “platform” approach to metadata collection, instead of an application-specific approach, where on-set or production metadata might not be considered useful in the digital supply chain or distribution metadata.

Applications that can analyze and correlate media assets with sources of user data can turn these static media assets into “data capital”—an asset class which will continue generating revenue throughout the life of the asset, much like real estate continuously generates income for its owners. Like real estate, the owners of data capital will have to invest in maintenance in order to keep generating revenue from that asset class. The ability to rerun an updated machine learning algorithm against an existing media asset library, correlated with more recent user data such as social media feeds or sensor data from location-based entertainment, may tease out previously overlooked narratives, or themes that can then inform new uses for the content.

However, the sheer size of media assets can make copying data from a passive archive like a tape library less agile than required for a quick reaction to market or celebrity news. A “data lake,” or globally scalable storage fabric consisting of scale-out NAS and geo-scale object storage systems, allows multiple workloads such as archiving, disaster recovery and collaboration to be executed without requiring multiple silos for each.

Now imagine you can weave an AI appliance into that data lake, which can be trained on your own data capital without having to migrate your data somewhere else for that purpose! This architecture will allow AI algorithms to perform facial recognition, object recognition, audio transcription, and even translation on media assets, in order to identify and track features which are useful to advertisers, piracy watchdogs, organizations tasked with identifying manipulated imagery, and others.

The appearance of toolsets which have moved “up the stack” from raw computer science algorithms, and become software frameworks and applications that run on scalable clustered appliances without having to migrate vast amounts of data has ushered in a new era of revenue generation. This in turn allows content rights-holders to breathe new life into their existing pipeline of content creation, content management and content distribution.

Tom Burns is Field CTO for Media and Entertainment, Dell EMC. He can be reached on Twitter at@TVBurns.

TV TECHNOLOGY: What do you anticipate will be the most significant technology trend at the 2017 NAB Show?

Tom Burns: The continued movement to all-IP media operations and the increasing virtualization of applications and solutions will continue to be the main topic of many conversations at the show. As many have previously noted, it won’t be an overnight transition to an all-IP-based infrastructure, but leading vendors are developing incredible software-defined solutions for media and entertainment that can easily take advantage of on-premise, high-performance infrastructure and cloud ubiquity. Virtualization of broadcast applications on enterprise IT infrastructure will also enable broadcast ISVs to avoid siloed hardware upgrade and downtime issues, and let them concentrate on developing application functionality.

TVT: What will be your most important product news?

Burns: We’re excited to present the Isilon All-Flash array, our brand-new flash storage product, to the NAB Show audience. With pressure from increasing media volume, the move to IP-based workflows and multiplatform content delivery, Isilon All-Flash provides the performance and efficiency to address those issues. The newest addition to the Dell EMC Isilon product family, now orderable, will enable media organizations to pursue new business opportunities, tackle new projects and expand their opportunities for media monetization.

TVT: How is your new product different from what’s available on the market?

Burns: Many vendors have introduced all-flash storage arrays, but Dell EMC Isilon All-Flash has a unique design that completely differentiates it from the rest of the market. Dell EMC has combined the extreme performance of flash technology with the proven scalability, true multiprotocol access and security of Isilon OneFS operating system. The Isilon OneFS operating system utilizes a native tiering capability that enables media companies to store and access content according to its business value, providing optimal storage, performance and protection—a critical capability for media and entertainment data. This benefit extends across the entire Isilon product family.

TVT: What is it about the NAB Show that brings you back every year?

Burns: Each year, the NAB Show allows us to engage with the majority of our customers and our fellow solution providers all in one central location.It’s the one show where attendees are guaranteed to leave with an up-to-date snapshot of the vibrant and progressive media industry. We look forward to networking with our partner ISVs and end-to-end solution providers and discussing the future of the marketplace with our peers.

MODERATOR: Tom Butts, Editor-in-Chief, TV Technology
FEATURED SPEAKER: Tom Burns, Field CTO for Media & Entertainment, Dell EMC

FEATURED SPEAKER: Sara Kudrle, Product Marketing Manager, Networking, Grass Valley