‘America’s Funniest Home Videos’ Creator Expands Its Avid Unity MediaNetwork

Vin Di Bona Productions, best known as the creator of America’s Funniest Home Videos, is now in its twenty-second year on ABC Television.  Vin Di Bona Productions recently expanded its Avid Unity MediaNetwork for the third time with Archion Technologies’ Synergy high-performance storage system.  Used by thousands of clients worldwide, Synergy integrates seamlessly with Unity and provides greater scalability and protection without compromising workflow and performance.

Last season, America’s Funniest Home Videos moved into HD production, utilizing the 64 terabytes (TB) of Synergy storage to handle AFV as well as all of the content produced by FishBowl Worldwide Media, its new, next-generation studio founded in Jan. 2010.

“We continue to add Archion’s Synergy storage to accomplish what we want without affecting our workflow,” said Sharon Arnett, vice president of postproduction, Vin Di Bona Productions and FishBowl Worldwide Media.  “Synergy has been a key part of our facility upgrade to HD and continues to be a cost-effective and highly efficient product for us, particularly as we expand into new shows with FishBowl.”

Arnett noted that FishBowl is now in production on a new TV series, Treasure Chase, for the Discovery Channel as well as new television shows for HGTV, MTV, and truTV.  FishBowl is also producing two hit web series, Ultimate Proposal, for Yahoo with 1.75 million views for the first webisode, and Cute Win Fail, currently in the YouTube Comedy Channel Top 20 with more than 10 million video views.

Key Code Media, an Archion reseller and one of Avid’s largest resellers, made the recommendation to Vin Di Bona Productions to continue to add Archion storage and then guided them through the purchase decision and installation.

“We have a strong relationship with Key Code Media and are also very happy with Archion’s very personal customer support,” Arnett added.  “They’ve been great to work with; it’s wonderful to have them both working closely together as a team to satisfy our needs.”

“America’s Funniest Home Videos has been on the air for more than 20 years, and their library of content is constantly increasing in size, especially since they started broadcasting in HD last season,” said Zeke Margolis of Key Code Media.  “Archion’s Synergy allows Vin Di Bona Productions to keep up with their growing storage needs by scaling their Unity in the most cost-effective manner possible.  We have upgraded their Unity with Archion three times now, and each time the process has been seamless.”

“We are delighted that Vin Di Bona Productions continues to see that adding Synergy storage to their Unity MediaNetwork is their best option for improving their workflow,” said Daniel Stern, Archion’s executive vice president of sales and marketing.  “Customers like these underscore our commitment to providing a compelling alternative to adding Avid storage or going through the expense and time of switching to a completely different shared storage platform.”

Archion’s line of RAID storage for Avid’s Unity MediaNetwork and Media Engine platforms has been proven with thousands of clients worldwide.  The Synergy XTR extends the Synergy’s abilities to a full 800 MB/second and increases its capacity to an amazing 32TBs in a single chassis for Unity Media Engine (5.x).  It is also certified for use with Unity MediaNetworks (v4.1x – 4.2x) and is fully compatible with other Archion-certified Unity add-on storage systems.

Synergy storage systems deliver 8-, 16- or 32 TB of storage in a compact three-rack unit design with a 16-drive chassis.  With its built-in, highly intelligent hardware RAID controller to manage storage more efficiently, Synergy XTR automatically rebuilds a faulty drive so that the rest of the network is unaffected by the drive failure.

With the award winning and patent-pending Vdisk technology, Archion ensures compatibility between versions and that operation is transparent to the Unity system.
Synergy XTR RAID controllers manage the disk drives, RAID sets and Vdisks in a more efficient manner, requiring far fewer drives than Avid storage subsystems to deliver higher capacities and resolutions.