Russian Broadcaster Relies on Front Porch Digital

Front Porch Digital, Inc.
announced that the All-Russian State Television
and Radio Broadcasting company (VGTRK) has purchased seven SAMMAsolo
tape-migration units and one DIVArchive CSM system with unlimited storage
capacity for its new datacenter in Moscow.

As Russia’s largest media corporation and operator of Russian information
agency RIA Novosti, VGTRK will use the SAMMAsolo units for mass migration and digitization
of videotapes from its media archives, and DIVArchive for file-based storage.

"VGTRK has a number of
legacy materials and a very low rate of repurposing – a situation it wanted to
rectify," said Mike Kalanchekaev, head of the broadcast IT division at
Okno TV, the Moscow distributor that handled the sale, system integration, and
support. "VGTRK wanted not only to
preserve its assets efficiently, but also to make the materials more accessible
to more people so that they can be more easily found and reused. The SAMMA and
DIVA products make that possible."

With the Front Porch Digital products in place, VGTRK can avoid
physically moving videotapes across its various facilities, which saves
transport expenses and speeds up VGTRK’s workflow.

VGTRK chose SAMMAsolo for ingest because, unlike regular
video-server solutions, the units satisfied requirements for real-time quality
control, simultaneous multiformat ingest, and migration-workflow
tools. Both the SAMMAsolo units and the DIVArchive system integrate with
VGTRK’s existing workflow and media asset manager. Users access the DIVArchive
site from any VGTRK corporate location in Moscow and around Russia via VGTRK’s
private distributed-IP network, which means VGTRK can allow more people than ever
before to access the archive.

"This is one of our
largest installations in Russia and is a perfect example of how our products
were designed not only to work together, but with other systems as well,"
said Rino Petricola, SVP and MD of Front Porch Digital International. "VGTRK’s system combines both SAMMA and
DIVArchive within the same integrated workflow, which will improve their
process across all of their stations."

SAMMAsolo is a single-stream migration solution that supports a variety of
video tape formats on input, and then delivers multiple digital files in flight
simultaneously, with frame-accurate lossless preservation quality, broadcast
quality mezzanine, and proxy. SAMMA can produce up to five different
simultaneous digital output files in real time in a wealth of formats.
SAMMAsolo is founded on a scalable, modular architecture allowing up to eight systems to be controlled simultaneously by one operator using a
centralized control interface, thus allowing the network to grow organically to
meet demand.

DIVArchive is Front Porch Digital’s CSM system, the software layer
that connects storage to video applications and equipment. The latest version,
DIVArchive V7.0, supports complex DPX packages and enables video-like
operations on film-carried content, making the solution desirable for film
production and post-production applications. The system implements the new open Archive eXchange Format (AXF) technology
developed by Front Porch Digital to protect, preserve, and facilitate the
exchange of content among storage systems.
DIVArchive V7.0 has the ability to interconnect every element of
operations from archive to production to transmission.