Front Porch to Manage 100TB Archive at Andrita Media Center

Front Porch Digital announced that the Andrita Media Center, a digital high-definition media facility on the West Coast, has selected its DIVArchive system to manage the transfer, storage, and restoration of content for the 26 television channels it broadcasts round-the-clock – a total of almost 100 TB of video files.

The transition to the DIVArchive solution is taking place in conjunction with the migration of the Andrita archive to Spectra Logic LTO-4 tape storage and with the implementation of a proxy server enabling browsing of stored images.

"DIVArchive is a next-generation product that will allow Andrita to more effectively populate our clients’ media across multiple platforms while accommodating the future needs of our growing operation," said Bill Tillson, Andrita’s president and chief operating officer. "In addition, because DIVArchive integrates with many of our existing systems, we will simultaneously gain improvements in storage capacity and file transfer speeds without experiencing significant disruption to our on-going operation."

Front Porch’s DIVArchive is a hardware and software solution that supports a unified system of near-line disk and data tape libraries, managing and moving digitized media content throughout its lifecycle, from ingest to long-term preservation. At Andrita, DIVArchive will enable transfers and restoration of content at speeds four times faster than was previously possible. The DIVArchive implementation will also improve operational efficiency and support new-media opportunities for Andrita clients by enabling one-time encoding of content taken from mezzanine HD masters for transcoding to multiple formats.

Located in Los Angeles, the Andrita Media Center, a Broadcast Facilities Inc. owned and operated facility, is a state-of-the-art 106,000 sq. ft. multichannel HD/SD digital server-based network origination, satellite transmission, production, and post-production media facility. Andrita originates a large roster of networks 24/7, including among others MGM HD, Hallmark HD Movie Channel, The Tennis Channel HD and SD, Current TV, SiTV, Universal Sports Network, Game Show Network, AFN, the Africa Channel U.S. and U.K., and three Tai Seng Asian movie channels.

In addition to channel origination and transmission services, Andrita provides disaster recovery; transcode/encode digital media creation to all major encode specifications; digital media manipulation, including metadata; digital file transfers via satellite, fiber, and IP; and production from three HD stages and forty HD Final Cut Pro edit stations.

"The Andrita Media Center is known for recognizing and implementing the best, most effective technology to deliver today’s most popular entertainment," said Mike Knaisch, president and CEO of Front Porch Digital. "DIVArchive’s flexibility and scalability ensure it will be an effective content storage management solution for this fast-growing media facility for a long time to come."

DIVArchive is due to be installed at Andrita this month with full implementation by the end of the month.