Pre-NAB Scuttlebut: Active Archives

Maybe this has happened to you: You're on deadline for a live, episodic show, and need a few seconds of archival footage. Except that it's somewhere else. And even though you put in the request a few hours ago, there's a wreck on the road between it, and you. Plus, it's on tape, which can make ingest unpredictably dicey -- which always seems to hijack your day right when you're on a super-tight deadline.

The tape finally arrives, but searching for the sliver of footage you need is painfully linear: First, the dang thing gets jammed in the machine, during which you learn that there's not even a spreadsheet or simple manifest database to guide you.

And then you find out that the guy who knows all the double-dog secret workarounds of the nine or so vendor-proprietary subsystems, necessary to get your segment going, is out and unreachable. (And it's only 10 in the morning.)

So You Have Archive Issues?

The common denominator in all of these day-to-day broadcast realities can be summed up in two words: Archive issues. Archive issues that hobble the ability to emulate the agility of Internet-sourced video. Archive issues that exacerbate storage capacity, aggravate operating costs, and lag viewer expectations.

Archive issues are an active undercurrent right now, in broadcast industry conversations -- in hallways, over dinner, and in cross-departmental meetings between ops-side people and IT-side people, often within the same organization. It's a daunting and communal challenge, all centered on the need for active archives, or at least some way to scale-out those archives, once and for all. On their cloud, or a public cloud, or some combination of the two.

Cisco UCS S-Series servers deliver a scalable, modular active data storage solution thats ideal for media. They offer storage that's less expensive than a NAS, but 100x faster than digital tape alternatives used for archiving. Check out the UCS S-Series on the Cisco website.

Here's the short list of how best to considerations, culled from my notes with multiple conversations with broadcast-side engineering and IT colleagues over the past few months. It's the same for all of us, one explained. It's all these questions about how best to' do this or that. In no particular order:

How best to scale out storage, as an over-riding driver.

How best to solve -- or at least stay reasonably ahead of -- video resolution advances, like the progression from HD to 4K to 8K (with 16K in the wings), each progressively heavier to carry.

How best to solve for the growing landscape of display screens, beyond the TV.

How best to harness the celebrated ease of use inherent to the Internet -- on the back end, and the viewer-facing front.

How best to make something truly evergreen -- for real, and forever. This is closely related to the matter of how to forever avoid the need for yet another data migration, from one tape or digital method to the next.

All of this is happening within the larger, organizational conundrum of how to slipstream into that new cultural norm that is agility, DevOps, and mobile speed -- itself a gear or two faster than Internet speed, which is several gears faster than traditional, broadcast speed.

Here's my short list of the perfect world for archive management, from the engineers, technologists, and data/IP-side people who work in media and entertainment. The specific ask was, what characterizes your perfect world, when it comes to your audio/video archives?

Active media archive solutions offer broadcasters options that are significantly less expensive and more flexible than traditional methods.

LINK:	http://www.tvtechnology.com/newbay-plus/0035/what-broadcasters-are-tal...
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