Video server and storage supplier Omneon announced two new customers for its MediaGrid storage system, which is designed for major ingest, production and playout applications and was first introduced at NAB.
ESPN Star Sports in Singapore and TV4 in Stockholm, Sweden, have followed the lead of Turner Broadcast Sports in London in adopting MediaGrid. The system uses multiple standard IT-based components and Gigabit Ethernet networking to provide access to large digital media files to multiple users, yielding centralized storage that is scalable in capacity, bandwidth and media processing power.
Russell Grute of systems integrator TSL was on hand at Omneon’s IBC press event Thursday to describe Omneon’s role at ESPN Star Sports, where the MediaGrid is being combined with OmniBus logging software, ENPS newsroom automation software, Apple Final Cut Pro nonlinear editors and an archiving system from Front Porch Digital in a project referred to as “Homerun.” The installation handles 25 simultaneous ingest feeds and provides access to over 100 users at one time, allowing ESPN Star Sports to process over 100 hours of fresh video daily and deliver 13 multilingual feeds.
“Sports is quite an exacting application—it’s all the worst things of news, and much more,” notes Grute.
Erik Ahlin of media management software firm Ardendo discussed TV4’s use of MediaGrid for an overhaul of the Swedish broadcaster’s news and sports production environment. TV4’s system combines a MediaGrid system holding 700 hours of high-resolution storage with Ardendo media management software, ENPS newsroom automation and 16 Apple Final Cut editors. It allows TV4 staffers to manage 20 ingest feeds and edit news clips directly from the MediaGrid server, using Easy Cut editors to perform rough cuts and the Final Cuts to edit the finished product.
“It’s very fast, as you don’t move any files,” explains Ahlin.
