Cleversafe and Museum of Broadcast Communications Celebrates One-Year Anniversary of Working Together

Cleversafe, Inc. announced the one year anniversary of working with Chicago-based Museum of Broadcast Communications (MBC). Cleversafe’s Dispersed Storage technology stores historic radio and television content while providing a seamless delivery system to a global audience of approximately 48,000 registered MBC members.

Cleversafe’s dsNet system is designed to store MBC’s 100,000 hours of digital content without incurring costly overhead in storage and bandwidth while providing the scalability to easily match capacity need as MBC’s digital content continues to grow. Viewers are exponentially increasing and MBC currently averages over 180,000 visits per month.

Since 1987, the not-for-profit MBC’s goal was collecting, preserving and streaming a wide array of historic and contemporary radio and television programs. In February 2009, MBC started using Cleversafe’s dsNet to manage its growing digital content challenges. Since implementing Cleversafe’s technology, MBC’s registered users grew 140 percent while providing more than 2.6 million unique visitors with immediate access to streaming content. Viewers can enjoy classic Super Bowl tech commercials such as Apple’s ‘1984’ or Xerox’s 1977 ‘scribing monk.’ MBC is currently celebrating Black History Month with numerous selections of classic ground-breaking series, and the museum will soon expand its already massive online documentary offerings with international content.

"MBC’s relationship with Cleversafe provides the backbone we need for storing digital content in the most secure and cost-effective way possible," said Bruce DuMont, founder and president of MBC. "Cleversafe’s scalable technology enables MBC to continue digitizing historic content without spending budget on extra disk drives, which allows us to invest our money in enhancing our presentation and user experience for visitors."

"MBC provides a valuable service to the public by preserving and sharing the historical landmarks of broadcasting for an educationally enjoyable experience," said Chris Gladwin, CEO of Cleversafe. "Our technology safely stores MBC’s digital content at a significantly lower price and smaller footprint while offering the highest level of data protection. The historical content can be safely preserved and shared while leaving ample room for MBC to expand their offerings and service."

Traditional storage systems, which typically store content on an array of mechanical disk drives with multiple copies for increased data protection, are extremely expensive to store multimedia content. Cleversafe’s technology defies conventional storage pitfalls by using an algorithm to divide data into ‘slices’ and dispersing them, via secure network connections, to multiple storage nodes on a dsNet system. Each individual slice contains too little information to be useful, but any threshold of the slices can be used to bit-perfectly recreate the original data.