Oireachtas Broadcasting Unit Uses Omneon

Omneon Inc. announced that the Oireachtas Broadcasting Unit (OBU), part of the Irish National Archive, is using an Omneon media storage and processing platform to record and archive all proceedings within the Irish Parliament, known as the Oireachtas, and to make broadcast-quality content from these proceedings available to Irish broadcasters.

“As part of the Irish National Archive, we must have 100 percent reliability for recording of all parliamentary proceedings,” said John Brady, technical director at the OBU. “The Omneon platform’s real-time performance and reliability meet this high standard while its on-board processing power enables automated QC processing and fast EDL flattening. By building our archiving operations on Omneon systems, we’ve been able to implement a more reliable and efficient proxy-based editing workflow that is compatible with multiple craft edit platforms; take advantage of faster restoration of stored assets; and reduce the space, cost, and power requirements of our overall operations.”

The OBU records feeds from the two Houses of the Oireachtas and from committee rooms, all located at Leinster House in Dublin, directly onto an Omneon Spectrum media server under IBIS automation control. As the Omneon Spectrum system ingests a feed, a copy of the high-resolution content is stored through an active transfer to the 24-TB Omneon MediaGrid, where content is accessed for QC and permanent archiving.

During ingest, Omneon ProBrowse simultaneously creates a low-resolution proxy that is used by the media management and automation system for browsing and EDL creation.

“The Omneon media storage and processing platform brings proven reliability and performance to government bodies and other institutions seeking to establish a streamlined yet versatile workflow for efficient tapeless editing and archiving of valuable audio and video recordings,” said Geoff Stedman, senior vice president of marketing and business development at Omneon. “The interoperability and scalability of the Omneon platform give the OBU the flexibility to further refine its workflow or expand its operations according to future requirements of the archives or the broadcasters it serves.”

Eurotek, the accredited Omneon reseller in Ireland, served as the prime contractor for the OBU project and delivered, installed, and commissioned a working system for the start of the parliamentary year in September 2009.