Home Depot Taps Omneon for End-to-End Production Workflow

The Home Depot Inc. has purchased an Omneon media processing and storage platform to enable more efficient handling of media at the Home Depot Television (HDTV) facility in Atlanta and to support the facility’s migration to a tapeless production workflow. As an end-to-end production platform, the Omneon platform will simplify media ingest and management, make it easier for HDTV staff to find and repurpose content, and facilitate delivery of finished video in the required format.

“The sheer volume of media we work with, and the growing need to be able to deal with every video format under the sun, made it clear that we needed to begin our move away from tape-based production,” says Bruce Covey, manager of business TV engineering at The Home Depot. “It’s a giant leap and one we’ve been working toward for years, and the Omneon platform promises to open the door to a totally different workflow built on file-based operations. We looked at many different products from many different companies, and Omneon alone listened to our needs, put a solution on the table, proved that it would work, and made it an investment that fit within our budget.”

The HDTV facility operates a satellite headend that delivers communications and employee training video to 2,244 The Home Depot stores in the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, Mexico, Guam, and China. In producing this combination of live and on-demand video, sent via satellite and also pushed to PCs at each store, HDTV undertakes between 500 and 600 projects a year, each averaging between 10 and 30 minutes. To shift these operations to file-based technology, HDTV invested in a platform comprising a four-channel Omneon MediaDeck server system, a 12-TB Omneon MediaGrid active storage system, the Omneon Media Application Server, and the Omneon ProXplore media clip and metadata management application.

Together, ProXplore and the Omneon MAS simplify the file-based media workflow by enabling enterprise-wide visibility and coordinated management of content and ensuring that HDTV can easily manage, access, and process stored content from a centralized platform. Built on standard IT hardware, the Omneon MAS provides an intelligent middleware layer between stored media content and the applications used to access or perform media processing tasks on content as it moves through its life cycle.

HDTV will ingest studio material directly into the MediaDeck system, which in turn will transfer material into the Omneon MediaGrid storage system, where content will be accessible to the facility’s edit systems. Finished material on the Omneon MediaGrid will be transcoded by the Omneon ProXchange system for delivery to HDTV’s on-air systems and also transcoded for file delivery to PCs at The Home Depot stores. The Omneon ProBrowse system will support media management throughout this workflow. The Omneon MediaGrid will be integrated with digital video archives running XenData’s X64 Edition Archive Series software to create an active workflow in which video assets are archived to and restored from LTO data tape.

“By managing its extensive corporate video assets with the Omneon MAS and ProXplore, HDTV will be able to streamline operations through centralized administration, configuration, and content security, as well as implement a standardized metadata model,” says Geoff Stedman, SVP of marketing and business development at Omneon.