Front Porch Digital and Omneon, Inc. have collaborated to deliver a tightly integrated system that combines the two companies' flagship products for active storage and content management. The Omneon MediaGrid active storage system and the Front Porch Digital DIVArchive content storage management (CSM) system have now been tested together and implemented with leading broadcasters worldwide.

Based on a combination of software and hardware components, DIVArchive from Front Porch Digital is a uniquely flexible CSM solution that simplifies the process of preserving, managing, and accessing content for operations of all sizes. The Omneon MediaGrid was designed to meet the storage capacity and bandwidth demands of large media files. Integration of the two systems provides broadcasters and other media companies with extremely fast access to archived content, something especially important in fast-paced media environments such as news and sports production.

"The holy grail for media companies is instant access to all their content, even material that has been in an archive for many years," said Mike Knaisch, president of Front Porch Digital. "Digital file-based workflows have long offered to deliver on this dream, and with the scalability and availability of storage offered through the MediaGrid system, combined with the performance of DIVArchive, reality is fast approaching that ideal."

DIVArchive can be used with the MediaGrid system for a number of content management applications within an operation. For instance, the MediaGrid system can act as online/nearline storage, with DIVArchive managing and controlling movement of content to playout servers or editing and graphics workstations. Additionally, DIVArchive can manage the flow of content from archive storage to and from the Omneon MediaGrid, as well as manage the copying and movement of content to remote mirrored sites for disaster recovery operations. The integrated system provides extremely fast performance and secure transactions, and it is currently in operation at leading broadcast operations worldwide, including NRK (Norway), ESPN (Singapore), TVI (Portugal), Arqiva (UK), and DISH Network (USA).

"The main assets of a media company reside in the content it owns, but the value of that content depends on more than just the quality of the material; if you cannot find a specific clip or get that clip to where it's needed, then it has no value at all," said Geoff Stedman, senior vice president for products and markets at Omneon. "The MediaGrid system solved the storage challenge of handling large media files in terms of availability and fast access, while DIVArchive solved the management issues of tracking and controlling file movement. Together, Front Porch and Omneon have created the complete package for content access, management, and protection."