News Technology & Live Sport
Going for gold
more than 3600 hours of broadcast, cable and
broadband coverage during 17 days. In terms of
viewership, that represented more than 10
million hours of video watched by 50 million
unique visitors to NBCOlympics.com - more
Bridging the Beijing-NY gap
than three times as many as during the Athens
Olympics. In addition, 6 million people accessed
NBC content on cell phones. By itself,
Continued from Page 26. NBCOlympics.com served 75.5 million video
streams. This was an unprecedented amount of
five different priority classes of transfers content distributed to a huge number of outlets,
coming from 12 different data sources in each with its own individual requirements. Only
Beijing, and from nine different data sources in by using an efficient, proxy-based workflow in
New York. conjunction with optimised file transfers, did
Once the proxies were in New York, NBC meet its commitment to offering complete
producers used Blue Order Media Archive DAM coverage while at the same time minimising the
workstations to view them, add logging notes, number of production people working in China.
select shots and create edit decision lists (EDLs). The NBC team is proud that its coverage of
These EDLs in turn triggered requests back to the Olympic Games was delivered where and
Beijing for the matching high-resolution clips. Omneon's Asia-Pacific marketing executive when the audience wanted it, without even a
At that point ProCast CDN - this time in concert Joyce Quark tries the NBC Olympics studio moment’s interruption. The system we
with MOG Solutions - once again kicked in to
presenter's Beijing chair for size.
developed worked without downtime for the
take the EDL and create MXF-wrapped proxy-based EDLs ensuring that only the actual entire duration of the event.
flattened files of EDL packages, transferring the high-resolution footage needed for each new
high-resolution material from Beijing to New content package was transferred from Beijing to Matt Adams moved to Omneon from NBC in
York. The content was then sent to craft edit New York that was key to saving network 2007. He won six Emmys as NBC Olympics’
stations and to transcoding for the creation of bandwidth and enabling such an efficient and director of technology for Atlanta (1996),
final content packages for distribution. effective workflow. Sydney (2000), Salt Lake City (2002), Athens
In essence, it was the intelligent use of For the Beijing Olympics, NBC presented (2004), and Torino (2006) Games coverage.
The changing role of
subtitling. Ensuring the browse encodings
obeyed open standards and were readily
accessible formats, expanded the abilities for
browse technology in today’s newsrooms
broadcasters to use the same browse content
for many collaborative applications including,
Continued from Page 25.
manually calculating the difference. remote users confirming the suitability of
Storyboards can be pulled form the browse media for international markets prior to
Into the future library dynamically without further analysis of shipping the high-resolution asset; and for
the media. Library annotations are cost- captioning and audio dubbing for sports and
Apart from the obvious advantages that effectively expanded thus improving the re-use events often using the browse media in
precise low bit-rate media can offer, the of footage and the ability to monetise even different manufactures products, with a
solutions have grown to embrace many forms small segments of the original content. compelling advantage for those who leverage
of browse-based workflows and offer new This in turn gives rise to another significant the IPV advantage.
ways of cataloguing, searching and viewing change driven by IPV - the introduction of the To that end IPV provides cost effective,
material for contribution to station output. It open browse environment. Systems have immediate precise access to live stories
became IPV’s mission to prove that among the historically been closed and proprietary and enabling collaborative and parallel working
core competencies required for a successful IPV was keen to see browse provide the methods, or workflows across the broadcast
browse solution - not just the simple act of backbone for sharing work between different production chain not only in newsroom
creating low bit-rate proxies - was the processes and indeed different businesses. This environments. As content and libraries come
necessity to intelligently encode and index the came into focus with application areas where under ever increasing pressure to generate
material itself not just the library. This the multiple re-use of browse proxies provided more returns, the value of browse does in fact
accelerates and streamlines the processes cost savings and changes in working methods. increase. It is true to say that the speed and
throughout the entire content preparation As a good example, one of our large global performance of networks and PC’s have
chain. So for instance, while adding subtitles media and entertainment customers in Asia accelerated over the years but as content gets
multiple users can work in parallel on the same asked IPV to apply a specific burnt in BUG that richer ever more demands are placed on
content and from a single API call; discover identified the browse source as its own immediacy and breadth of access - and this is
the length of the scene they are working on, property and then allowed them to only truly achievable with an efficient and
replacing the traditional methods of playing electronically transfer a copy of the proxy to a well-structured intelligent browse encoding
through and noting the in and out points then third party for multiple language dubbing and and infrastructure being in place.
28 IBE NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2008
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