China TV Network Selects DataDirect for New 2008 Olympics Channel

DataDirect Networks, Inc. announced that China Central Television (CCTV), China’s largest television network, has selected DataDirect Networks’ Silicon Storage Architecture (S2A) platforms to support broadcast production of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games across the People’s Republic of China. The 2008 Beijing Olympics are expected to be watched by a record-setting 1.3 billion viewers in China this summer on CCTV’s multiple channels — which will also provide feeds to numerous foreign broadcasters — creating significant new requirements for data bandwidth, throughput and scalability.

The intricately complex data patterns that broadcasting, post-production and digital intermediate applications create and process contain much larger file sizes than conventional data storage systems can handle — files, such as those expected by CCTV for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, that must be rapidly accessed and edited by multiple users simultaneously, in addition to being stored and available, minutes, months and years in the future.

After extremely rigorous and thorough testing and analysis of DataDirect Networks and several comparative offerings, CCTV determined that no other storage system came close to the performance, throughput, maximum bandwidth and scalable capacity of DataDirect Networks’ S2A solutions.

"Our solutions are optimized for companies that demand extreme performance for their large content files and unstructured data," said Paul Bloch, President, DataDirect Networks. "We are honored to provide the data backbone for this milestone event that will place CCTV on a truly global stage, and help China’s largest television network to deliver an unprecedented, rich and memorable experience for the expected one billion plus viewers of the 2008 Beijing Olympics in China."

Sobey Digital Technology Co., Ltd., the leading professional multimedia solutions provider in China and a key distributor of DataDirect Networks’ portfolio of extreme storage solutions, successfully architected a digital broadcasting solution for CCTV based on DataDirect Networks S2A storage platforms. As a result of its collaborative partnership with Sobey, DataDirect Networks solutions are deployed in over 100 broadcasters across China.