Outdoor Channel

Outdoor Channel

Now more than ever it is easy to sit back in the comfort of your home, and, with the click of a TV remote, see and hear the most beautiful hunting and fishing shows on TV. From fishing in the deep blue Pacific to hunting in the pristine Rocky Mountains, they all come alive in HD on the Outdoor Channel. Outdoor Channel, located in Temecula, CA, offers HD programming that captures the excitement of outdoor adventures and the Western lifestyle.

Outdoor Channel recently transformed its facility from a tape-based workflow to a file-based workflow; however, there were still pockets of operational inefficiency that needed to be addressed.

Enter IEEI.TV and Dennis Bress, president/CEO. "As solutions partner to Outdoor Channel, we were afforded the opportunity to install world-class, tested solutions like the scalable specialty media workflow storage platforms manufactured by Apace Systems," he said. "These storage servers are the heart of the digital media services platform at Outdoor Channel. Currently installed is 212TB of vStor for shared, real-time editing and eStor for online archive and production, editorial, QC and CC work in progress. This storage is NAS with GigE and 10GigE interfaces. The storage is seen by other key services like the Telestream Pipeline HD Dual video ingest system and the ever-important tool that all media companies can't live without anymore: the transcode farm."

Outdoor Channel's transcode farm was upgraded from FlipFactory to a pair of Telestream Vantage workflow automation servers. Vantage, with its easy-to-use workflow GUI and ability to automatically process multiple transcodes, provided the processing capabilities needed to support digital workflow across all departments. The redundant, dual-server configuration gives Outdoor Channel the security and comfort of knowing it has a fail-safe solution that will not suffer any delays in critical workflow. Coupled with Aspera for file delivery, Outdoor Channel is prepared to deliver any format, any time to anywhere.

For archive, the Vantage-transcoded Harris broadcast format, half the file size of the production format, is saved on the Apace NAS. In addition to size, another benefit to archiving the broadcast format is the easy reairing of this archived content with a simple mouse click.

In one week alone, 20 hours of manual labor were eliminated by pulling from the digital archive for reairing of shows. Immediate cost savings on VTR maintenance, tape stock and encoding service fees have contributed to a speedy ROI.

New studio technology — HD
Submitted by IEEI.TVDesign teamApace Systems: Lee C. Hu, pres.; Jeanclaude Toma, exec. VP; Junroen "JayR" Elpedes, eng.; Andy Gorman, eng.
IEEI.TV: Dennis Bress, pres./CEO
Outdoor Channel: Paul Weaver, sr. dir. of eng.; Mike Kozdrey, mgr. of eng.; Robert Southward, sr. mgr. master control; Peter Chapman, sr. eng.; Robert Nicholson, sr. eng.; Brad Markham, sr. dir. post prod.; Brian Hamada, QC and CC mgr.
Telestream: Chuck Buelow, western regional mgr.; Greg Cox, field applications eng.Technology at workApace Systems: eStor, vStor, postMAM with iPad interface
Aspera: Connect server
Telestream: Episode Pro, Pipeline HD Dual video capture, Vantage workflow automation