Harmonic announced it will provide Omneon MediaGrid shared storage systems and ProMedia Carbon enterprise transcoding software to NBC Olympics, a division of the NBC Sports Group, during its production of the 2012 London Olympic Games from London, England, July 27-Aug. 12. The announcement was made today by David Mazza, senior vice president of engineering for NBC Olympics, and Matt Adams, Harmonic vice president of broadcast solutions for the Olympics.
Harmonic’s media storage and transcoding systems will enable NBC Olympics to process and deliver high-quality content quickly, while relying entirely on digital media in a file-based environment within the NBC Olympics Highlights Factory, which is used to support content creation for NBCOlympics.com, mobile platform distribution, and IPTV and VOD services. The integration of the MediaGrid storage systems with Avid edit and media management systems facilitates a fast, highly efficient file-based highlights production workflow in which all editors have immediate and simultaneous access to content.
To ensure fast turnaround for on-demand content, NBC Olympics will use a ProMedia Carbon transcoding farm to generate the high-quality multiformat video delivered to TVs, PCs and mobile devices via the NBCOlympics.com website. Supporting an extensive array of acquisition, editing, broadcast, Web and mobile video formats, ProMedia Carbon minimizes file movement and improves workflow efficiency by enabling all transcoding operations to be performed in place on the MediaGrid file system.
During the 2012 London Olympic Games, incoming HD content from different venues will be recorded by Sony XDCAM XDS-PD1000 systems and transferred along with a low-res proxy to a 288TB MediaGrid at the International Broadcast Center in London. At the same time, those full-resolution recordings will be replicated and transferred by Harmonic’s ProCast IP acceleration solution over a 10G circuit to a 432TB MediaGrid system at NBCUniversal’s “30 Rock” facility in New York City. In both London and New York, ProMedia Carbon will perform transcoding of content on the MediaGrid systems.
The Avid Interplay MAM will give users on both sides of the Atlantic access not only to proxy versions of newly captured content, which they can use to create their shotlists, but also to extensive live logs and stats, scoring, and timing information embedded as metadata. The resulting shotlists will be sent out to distribution outlets or delivered to edit rooms when needed for broadcast.
