DataDirect Networks > Case Studies > ACCELERATE: MEDIA BROADCAST - Czech Television Speeds and Simplifies FastGrowing Media Broadcast and Production Demands with Fully Integrated, Future-Proof DDN MEDIAScaler Storage Platform

ACCELERATE: MEDIA BROADCAST - Czech Television Speeds and Simplifies FastGrowing Media Broadcast and Production Demands with Fully Integrated, Future-Proof DDN MEDIAScaler Storage Platform

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Region

Europe

Country

Czech Republic

Product

DDN MEDIAScaler

Tech Stack

IBM Spectrum Scale File System
DDN Storage Fusion Architecture
Edgecore switch-based network

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Productivity Improvements
Cost Savings

Technology Category

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services

Applicable Industries

Telecommunications

Applicable Functions

Discrete Manufacturing
Product Research & Development

Use Cases

Factory Operations Visibility & Intelligence
Predictive Maintenance

Services

System Integration
Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services

About The Customer

Czech Television is the public television broadcaster in the Czech Republic, delivering six channels of news, sports, family, arts, and educational content. The organization produces more than two-thirds of its programming using state-of-the-art television production technologies and services, including ultra-high-definition (UHD) formats. Additionally, Czech TV is a leader in hybrid viewing, with more than 87,000 hours of recordings archived for on-demand distribution to smart phones and hybrid TVs. As a broadcaster and post-production facility, Czech TV embraces the latest solutions to accelerate collaborative workflows and manage end-to-end media lifecycles. The organization’s fully featured postproduction suites are designed to meet any filmmaker’s requirements with transcoding, editing, Dolby® mixing, and color correction on the most current 4K media streams.

The Challenge

Czech Television, the public television broadcaster in the Czech Republic, was facing a surge in digital video content and high-end video equipment which spurred the need for fast, scalable, robust, and reliable storage. The move to 4K uncompressed DPX workflows created a major spike in storage requirements, as the size of native raw files quadrupled as well as the performance required by the storage. Despite the massive data influx, Czech TV still had to guarantee flawless real-time workflows of concurrent UHD video streams—across ingest, editing, transcoding, distributing, and archiving. They needed to accommodate multiple teams of people working on the same large files all at once to perform necessary color correction, and as well as restore many old films in bad initial condition.

The Solution

Czech TV deployed DDN’s MEDIAScaler parallel file system which serves as an all-in-one, high-performance storage appliance with streamlined deployment and ensured ease of use by consolidating multiple workflows on a single system. It provides fast, efficient support for around-the-clock operations and has the ability to scale to capacity, and performance on demand keeps pace with a wide variety of media workflows. The deployment of the DDN MEDIAScaler with one petabyte of raw capacity was simple and straightforward. The installation and data migration from the legacy storage was completed in less than two weeks with no disruption to Czech TV’s 24-hour operation.

Operational Impact

Production teams readily manage multiple, high-end 4K workflows without bottlenecks.
Integrated platform enables use of a single system for data ingest, color correction, film restoration, transcoding, and finalizing media files.
Ability to add workflows on demand keeps pace with growing broadcast and production needs.
Getting away from legacy SAN FC-based technologies makes CzechTV have a very low TCO.

Quantitative Benefit

Up to five workstations doing real-time 4K DPX can work concurrently with no performance hit.
The ability to integrate new clients on demand helps avoid any rigidity.
OpenFlow support ensures fast, flexible path to open networking in the future.