Sportscaster ESPN Star Sports (ESS) has selected SeaChange International's Broadcast MediaCluster video server system for on-air delivery of television programming to viewers in 25 countries including India.
Over 360 hours of broadcast material will be stored on the stand-alone video server system and it will deliver eight regional television channels in English, Hindi, Mandarin and Cantonese. ESPN Star Sports' Broadcast MediaCluster deployment will be live at the end of August, says an official release.
ESS says it chose Broadcast MediaCluster on the basis of around-the-clock reliability, simple expandability and unique storage protection. More than 500 field staff throughout Asia capture sports content for ESS network programming, which emanates from a 60,000 square-foot, state-of-the-art production and transmission facility in Singapore. Here, SeaChange's Broadcast MediaCluster takes the role of on-air server. The operator has also taken on board a new Encoda Automation system, which has been integrated with SeaChange video server systems in customer deployments around the world.
SeaChange's Broadcast MediaClusters are comprised of `server nodes,' which leverage it's patented RAID2 ("raid squared") architecture to scale gracefully in storage and I/O capacity, while providing the only single copy, 100% fault-resilient video server in the broadcast market. ESPN Star Sports' choice, the Broadcast MediaCluster 1650 series, uses as many as 16 disk drives per server node and delivers over 40 I/Os in a seven-node configuration.
Says ESS director of engineering Andy Rylance, "Singapore is a hotbed of technologically advanced television operations that reach out across Asia. Through numerous noteworthy deployments here, SeaChange and its partner Magna Systems have earned a solid reputation for cost-performance and local service. We surveyed a number of approaches for our on-air content playback and SeaChange's Broadcast MediaCluster really came out strongest on our top criteria - the ability to withstand any frame failure without any extended interruption to our services."
SeaChange International claims to be the world leader in digital video systems that are changing television.
