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Seagate to Aid NBC's HD Broadcast of Beijing Olympics

By Michael Dinan, TMCnet Editor

A Scotts Valley, California-based company that specializes in hard disc drives and storage solutions announced today that its products will play a role in bringing next month’s Olympic Games from Beijing to the United States.

 

Officials from Seagate Barracuda say their “ES” series of hard drives will be used by a media company that’s helping NBC broadcast its coverage of the games, which are scheduled to run from Aug. 8 to 24.

 

Bill Schilling, Seagate’s marketing director, said his company’s products will help NBC capture every moment of the competition in China.

 

“We welcomed the opportunity to work with Omneon to support NBC for its Olympics coverage,” Schilling said. “Omneon is the market leader for developing storage solutions for broadcast video, which is becoming more prevalent via the Web, especially for hugely popular sporting events like the Olympics.”

 

The company says its media servers and storage systems will allow NBC to produce 3,600 hours of coverage during the games – a three-fold increase over the coverage during the 2004 Athens Olympic Games.

 

“Picture this,” Seagate officials say. “A gymnast leaps onto the balance beam. By the time she makes a dismount, NBC’s broadcast footage has already been stored on the Seagate Barracuda ES hard drive in Omneon’s Beijing MediaGrid active storage system, traveled 6,350 miles to the New York MediaGrid active storage system, processed, and quickly transmitted as compelling coverage on television and (the Internet).”

 

Specifically, Seagate hard drives will power 20 MediaDeck servicers in China, according to the company. Officials say the hard drives are used to digitize and “ingest” high-definition feeds.

 

“Each MediaDeck server contains both high-resolution and low-resolution codecs to simultaneously create both full-resolution IMX or XDCAM HD files and low-resolution proxy files of all recordings,” company officials say. “The resulting files are actively transferred, while still being recorded, to the MediaGrid active storage system.”

 

That’s where Omneon comes in. Using the company’s “ProCast CDN” content distribution system, proxies are transferred thousands of miles from the MediaGrid active storage system in Beijing to a second MediaGrid storage system in New York, according to the company, and there producers can browse, view and edit the files.

 

Omeon’s senior vice president of products and markets, Geoff Stedman, said his company decided to use Seagate’s hard drives because the flow of material must be seamless.

 

Michael Dinan is a TMCNet Editor. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

 

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