500TB of Seagate HDDs at 2008 Olympic Games for NBC

The Seagate Technology Barracuda ES Series is the hard drive of choice for NBC’s coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The Seagate hard drives are powering 20 Omneon MediaDeck servers to digitize and ingest HD coverage from the Olympic Games. The video files are actively transferred, while still being recorded, to a MediaGrid active storage system in Beijing then to a second MediaGrid storage system in New York.

 
The media servers and storage systems allow NBC to present more than 3,600 hours of coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the most ambitious single media project in history and more than the combined total of every Summer Olympics ever televised in the United States.
NBC’s coverage will average nearly 212 hours per day for 17 days – more than 8 days of coverage during every single day of the Olympics.

 
Seagate storage is enabling Olympics viewers around the world to watch what they want, whenever they want and wherever they want:

• ONLINE: Olympic fans will have access to approximately 2,200 total hours of live streaming Olympic broadband video coverage on NBCOlympics.com.
• ON-DEMAND: In addition to the 3,600 total hours of coverage mentioned above, NBCOlympics.com also will feature approximately 3,000 hours of Highlights, Rewinds and Encores.
• ON-THE-GO: Watch Olympics coverage On-the-Go anywhere…anytime. Once you’ve downloaded the episode you’ll be able to watch it anywhere at anytime, even offline.
•  DIRECTV on Demand is offering 10 hour-long Olympic titles each week to customers with VOD-enabled DVRs, which can translate into even greater demand for high-capacity DVR storage to capture the additional hours of programming.

 
Seagate donated a number of its FreeAgent Pro external drives and 1TB Barracuda desktop drives to photographers from China’s Digi-Life magazine, who documented the construction of the mammoth Beijing Olympic Stadium, also known as the ‘Bird’s Nest’. The stadium covers 258,000 square meters and holds more than 90,000 people.

Quotes:

“NBC needs to capture every second of every competition at multiple venues in China, quickly turning them into dynamic programming for television and Internet broadcasting – nothing can fall through the cracks,” said Bill Schilling, marketing director at Seagate. “We welcomed the opportunity to work with Omneon to support NBC for its Olympics coverage. Omneon is the market leader for developing storage solutions for broadcast video, which is becoming more prevalent via the Web, especially for hugely popular sporting events like the Olympics.”

“For the first time, the average American will be able to create their own unique Olympic experience whether at home, at the office or on-the-go,” said Dick Ebersol, Chairman, NBC Universal Sports & Olympics and Executive Producer of NBCU’s Olympic coverage. “With 25 sports streamed live at NBCOlympics.com and significant live coverage on our cable platforms and NBC, highlighted by all swimming finals, the biggest nights of gymnastics and beach volleyball live in primetime, the viewer has plenty of options for live coverage. In the 41 years since my first Olympics, it’s staggering to me to be involved in a Games where we are producing 2,900 hours of live coverage – especially from an Olympics half-a-world away. It’s more live coverage from a single Olympics than the total of all previous Summer Olympics combined. The enormity of what we’re doing just blows me away.”
 

“Because the workflow must be seamless and the nature of the programming is so significant, we decided to use Seagate’s enterprise hard drives, which are the best fit for our needs in terms of reliability, best-in-class design and unrivaled performance,” said Geoff Stedman, SVP products and markets at Omneon.