ESPN STAR Sports media system designed by TSL

Omneon Video Networks announced that ESPN STAR Sports (ESS), Asia s leading sports broadcaster, has purchased a
MediaGrid active storage system and Omneon Spectrum media server systems to
serve as the core of a new production system capable of handling 2,000 hours of
media at 50 MB/s. The storage and server implementation, which is being
designed and supplied by U.K.-based systems integrator TSL, will support a new
file-based environment and a much more flexible and collaborative production
workflow for the network s live sports and sports news coverage.

In the fast-moving world of multiregion, multilanguage live sports, we
need technology that allows us to enhance the offerings we provide to our
viewers, said Tom McVeigh, Senior Vice President, Operations and Technology,
at ESPN STAR Sports. Omneon s storage solutions are flexible, scalable, and
future-proof systems we can rely on to deliver cost-effective storage for our
production environment. The MediaGrid will integrate well with our existing
systems and with other new gear to enable a complete overhaul of our production
workflows. It is one of the more critical pieces in this puzzle, and it will
play a key role in enabling us to achieve our overall project objectives.

ESS is moving from a totally tape-based production environment to a fully
server-based environment, which will allow the network to establish far more
rapid turnaround of sports content to its 13 television networks. The project,
dubbed Home Run, will incorporate the Omneon MediaGrid system and four Omneon
Spectrum media servers equipped with 50 I/O ports and linked directly to 25
Apple Creative Studio systems, equipped with Final Cut Pro
nonlinear edit systems, to enable immediate edit-in-place capability at
multiple workstations simultaneously. Within this collaborative workflow,
production staff will not only gain faster access to media, but also gain the
ability to view and work with other packages under production.

The timely and accurate production of sports content for 13 channels
broadcast in four languages to 26 countries presents an enormous technical
challenge, said TSL Head of Sales Russell Grute. Omneon s storage systems
in conjunction with OmniBus OPUS will greatly enhance the capacity,
flexibility, and speed of operations at ESS, enabling the new Home Run system
to offer a faster and more collaborative workflow. A whole new approach to
production and media lifecycle management for a busy sports and news
broadcaster like ESS.

Combining grid storage and grid computing through
the use of multiple intelligent, interconnected-yet-independent storage
servers, the Omneon MediaGrid system dramatically enhances the efficiency of
digital media access for users and applications across the entire broadcast
workflow. The MediaGrid system provides centralized shared storage that is
scalable in capacity, bandwidth, and media processing power.

The modular MediaGrid system uses
industry-standard components and connectivity to create a highly configurable,
reliable, and cost-effective system. Components of the system communicate over
standard Ethernet networks and generate massive aggregate bandwidth that is
available to external clients of the system, eliminating bottlenecks associated
with traditional shared-storage environments. Each storage component is also a
media-processing engine, making computational resources available to
applications for media-processing functions while content resides within the
storage system.

The Omneon-based storage system will be managed by an OmniBus OPUS News
& Sports Logging system and deliver archive content to a new Front Porch
Digital DIVArchive system. The initial system build and test of the
overall production system at ESS is scheduled for January 2007.