Enabling end-to-end digital workflow

Created from a strategic partnership between Groupe CANAL+ and TVN Group, nc+ offers its 2.5 million customers up to 180 channels, including 50 in HD and a range of live sporting events. A new all-digital infrastructure based on StorNext helped the broadcaster streamline and simplify management of current assets of over 1.5 petabytes and will easily accommodate another petabyte of content nc+ expects to add over the next year.
The previous infrastructure at nc+ was based on videotape, making it a slow and manual process for producing new material. Re-using existing content was also complex and time-consuming. In creating its new digital system, nc+ had four main objectives:
· Streamline the workflow for new and existing content;
· Reduce editing and post-production time;
· Automate the transcoding process; and
· Make it easier and faster to adopt and support emerging platforms, including mobile devices.

Working with SAD, a leading video systems integrator, nc+ selected an open systems-capable storage system that integrates access to content across best-of-breed heterogeneous applications. Quantum’s StorNext File System and StorNext Storage Manager™ software and StorNext AEL6000 Archives met those needs and were critical to achieve end-to-end workflow efficiency as the backbone of nc+’s new infrastructure.

The StorNext File System controls 200TB of nc+’s nearline disk archive: It ingests all the file-based content, holds low-resolution proxies, and makes content available to a dozen production, quality control, transcoder, and playout servers over a high-speed Fibre Channel link. In addition, with tens of thousands of hours of film, recorded sports video and other content to store, the nc+ team relies on StorNext Storage Manager (SNSM) to provide a tiered storage system with one common storage pool that combines the capacity of the nearline disk with digital LTO tapes in two StorNext AEL6000 Archives. In the repository, recent assets are all on disk, but SNSM moves older content to tape for longer term storage, automatically making two copies of each asset for redundancy.

Another reason for selecting StorNext was its timecode-based Partial File Retrieval (PFR) feature to speed up the process of moving content from the archive to production and playout servers. When the nc+ asset manager requests content, it uses time codes to identify needed footage. StorNext, using PFR, retrieves only the specific containers from the asset files that are needed for the task. Partial file handling increases the speed of editing, post-production, and staging playout content, and it dramatically reduces disk requirements.