Quantum StorNext at Polish Broadcaster nc+

Quantum Corporation announced its StorNext software and appliances
have helped nc+, Poland’s pay-TV
broadcaster, increase its production output by 30% with a transition to
an all-digital content workflow.

Created from a strategic partnership between Groupe CANAL+ and TVN
Group, nc+ offers its 2.5 million customers up to 180 channels, including
50 in HD and a range of live sporting events. A new
all-digital infrastructure based on StorNext has helped the
broadcaster streamline management of current assets of over 1.5PB and will accommodate
another petabyte of content nc+ expects to add over the next year.

The previous infrastructure at nc+ was based on videotape, making it a slow and
manual process for producing new material. Re-using existing content was also
complex and time-consuming.

In creating its new digital system,
nc+
had four main objectives:

• Streamline the workflow for new and existing content;
• Reduce editing and post-production time;
• Automate the transcoding process; and
• Make it easier and faster to adopt and support emerging platforms, including
  mobile devices.

Working with SAD Ltd, a video systems
integrator, nc+ deployed an open systems media production and archive solution
that integrated broadcast products from many different suppliers. As the
backbone of the new infrastructure, nc+ selected StorNext File System
and StorNext AEL6000 Archives leveraging StorNext Storage Manager (SNSM), which
provide access to content across the different applications and are critical to
achieving the workflow efficiency nc+ requires.

The StorNext File System controls 200TB
of the nc+ nearline disk archive: it ingests all the file-based content, holds
low-resolution proxies, and makes content available to a dozen production,
quality control, transcoder, and playout servers over FC link.

In addition, with tens of thousands of hours of film, recorded sports video and
other content to store, the nc+ team relies on StorNext Storage Manager to
provide a tiered storage system with one common storage pool that combines the
capacity of the nearline disk with digital LTO tapes in two StorNext AEL6000
Archives. In the repository, recent assets are all on disk, but SNSM moves
older content to tape for longer term storage, automatically making two copies
of each asset for redundancy.

Another reason for selecting StorNext was its timecode-based Partial File
Retrieval (PFR) feature to speed up the process of
moving content from the archive to production and playout servers.
When the nc+ asset manager requests content, it uses time codes to identify
needed footage. StorNext, using PFR, retrieves only the specific containers
from the asset files that are needed for the task. Partial file handling
increases the speed of editing, post-production, and staging playout content,
and it reduces disk requirements.

Jarosław
Kordalewski, executive director, TV technology and IT systems, nc+, said: "Quantum StorNext is the center of the nc+
station. Even though the editors and post production teams don’t see it directly – which is just
the way it should be – it underlies the entire new end-to-end content workflow
we put in place."

Mateusz
Karolak, presales manager, SAD, said: "StorNext has turned a complex job – finding the right files,
extracting the right content, and delivering it in the right format – into a
fast, automated process. It works with the rest of the tools so well that it
often delivers content from the archive to production servers in less than a
minute – a job that could take an hour in the old system. We’ve calculated an overall
production performance increase of 30%."

Alex
Grossman, VP, media and entertainment, Quantum, said: "The scope of the nc+ project and the
efficiencies achieved are testament to the power of StorNext and the ease in
which it can be implemented for immediate results. We are well-versed in the
evolving media and entertainment industry’s high-performance speed, scale and
tiering requirements for managing massive amounts of content and are thrilled
to have met them for nc+ with this end-to-end workflow solution."