To meet increasing bandwidth demands for two new 24/7 TV channels, Premier Media Group, operators of Fox Sports Australia, has added high-speed transcoding technology and servers from SGI.
Designed to overcome the workflow restrictions of tape-based ingest, Premier used SGI’s Altix XE ingest and InfiniteStorage servers as the backbone of the end-to-end D10/MXP digital workflow. Because of the system’s scalable architecture, Premier is constantly beefing up its infrastructure to support live ingest and broadcast, SAN archive and library management.
The new channels — Fox Sports 1 and Fox Sports News — add more international sports and sports news to the network’s previous four-channel service.
To prep for the launch, the company expanded its InfiniteStorage Shared Filesystem CXFS-based Storage Area Network (SAN) with 4Gb Fibre Channel fabric, and an InfiniteStorage TP9700 system. The SAN, with an Ardendo suite of ingest and asset management software tools for content management, now totals upward of 33TB.
Based in Sydney, New South Wales, and employing approximately 300 people on its premises, Premier currently accesses 25-30 remote feeds to generate more than 17 hours of live sports daily while shooting, editing and airing a wide variety of sports-related programming.
The key SGI components were integrated with the Ardendo applications, a Sony PetaSite archive (which has now almost doubled in size to more than 530TB), interfaces to 10 nonlinear editing systems and the existing traffic and automation system.
