Harmonic to Provide Storage Systems For NBC Olympics

Harmonic, Inc. will provide Omneon
MediaGrid shared storage systems and ProMedia Carbon enterprise transcoding
software to NBC Olympics, a division
of the NBC Sports Group, during its production of the 2012 London Olympic Games
from London, England, July 27 – Aug. 12.

The announcement was made by David Mazza, SVP of engineering for NBC Olympics,
and Matt Adams, Harmonic VP of broadcast solutions for the Olympics.

The Harmonic media storage and transcoding systems will enable NBC Olympics to
process and deliver quality content quickly, while relying on
digital media in a file-based environment within the NBC Olympics Highlights
Factory, which is used to support content creation for NBCOlympics.com, mobile
platform distribution, and IPTV and VOD services.

The integration of the MediaGrid storage systems with Avid edit and media
management systems facilitates a file-based highlights production workflow in
which all editors have immediate and simultaneous access to content.

To ensure turnaround for on-demand content, NBC Olympics will use a
ProMedia Carbon transcoding farm to generate the multiformat video
delivered to TVs, PCs, and mobile devices via the NBCOlympics.com website.

Supporting an array of acquisition, editing, broadcast, Web, and mobile video
formats, ProMedia Carbon minimizes file movement and improves workflow by enabling all transcoding operations to be performed in place on the
MediaGrid file system.

"This is the third consecutive Olympic
Games in which Harmonic’s solutions have played a critical role in the
broadcast workflow," said Adams. "The combination of high performance, management simplicity, and broad
support for media applications makes MediaGrid an optimal choice compared with
other storage products, and the addition of ProMedia Carbon’s broad format
support, high- quality output, fast transcoding speed and enterprise-class
scalability creates an ideal solution for delivering the vast amount of
coverage from live events of this scale."

"When we’re able to give our production team unrestricted access to all
media, with search tools that help them to find the best shots, we enable them
to create segments with high-emotional impact," said Craig Lau, VP,
information technology, NBC Olympics. "We’re
storytellers at heart, and by facilitating fast, flexible media access, the
MediaGrid storage systems with ProMedia Carbon get right at the core of what
we’re trying to accomplish: telling the stories of the athletes in these Olympic
competitions."

During the 2012 London Olympic Games, incoming HD content from different venues
will be recorded by Sony XDcam XDS-PD1000 systems and transferred along with a
low-res proxy to a 288TB MediaGrid at the International Broadcast Center in London.
At the same time, those full-resolution recordings will be replicated and
transferred by Harmonic’s ProCast IP acceleration solution over a 10G circuit
to a 432TB MediaGrid system at NBCUniversal’s ’30 Rock’ facility in NYC. In both London and New York, ProMedia Carbon will perform transcoding of
content on the MediaGrid systems.

The Avid Interplay MAM will give users on both sides of the Atlantic access not
only to proxy versions of newly-captured content, which they can use to create
their shotlists, but also to extensive live logs and stats, scoring, and timing
information embedded as metadata. The resulting shotlists will be sent out to
distribution outlets or delivered to edit rooms when needed for broadcast.

In addition to the MediaGrid and ProMedia Carbon systems at the IBC and at 30
Rock, NBC Olympics will use 72TB MediaGrid systems along with ProMedia Carbon
transcoders at the three largest venues – track and field, gymnastics, and
swimming – for storage and processing of content offloaded over a 1Gbps
connection from EVS XT server systems. This model will enable NBC Olympics to
keep event footage available over the course of a competition.