Target The Public Television Market With DVD

Rorke Data (Eden Prairie, MN), a subsidiary of Bell Microproducts, Inc. (San Jose, CA), is a hybrid company, being part reseller and part OEM. The company resells products from other vendors, but also designs and sells its own hardware and software solutions. Recently, the company has targeted the public television market.

Broadcasting is a primary vertical market addressed by Rorke Data. One trend in that industry is a move toward all digital media. "The FCC [Federal Communications Commission] is mandating that television stations deliver their content in an all-digital format," says Joe Rorke, VP of sales for Rorke Data. "Stations will no longer be able to use video tapes. By going to all digital media, stations will have a central repository of news clips and footage that can be managed and distributed by servers more efficiently. Digital storage is a better way to manage content and makes monitoring and tracking of clips easier for the FCC."

Build A DVD Storage Solution
Many small- to medium-sized stations know this change will be a very costly one, and many have been putting off the conversion. Idaho Public Television (Idaho PTV) (Boise, ID), like most stations, was using video servers. A video server sends and receives footage (from a satellite uplink for example) and encodes or decodes the footage into a usable format like MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group). The server also streams video for viewing. The problem with video servers is the storage. "Video servers are connected to very expensive Fibre Channel storage with proprietary interfaces," says Rorke. "Most off-the-shelf storage solutions cannot be connected to those interfaces." Therefore, adding additional hard disk storage can be an expensive endeavor.

Idaho PTV already had a combination of tape and digital storage. Further complicating matters, the station had not one, but five video servers in its production environment. "Every television station has different video servers and different automation software packages," says Rorke. "There are maybe a dozen different video server manufacturers on the market. There is no canned product a VAR can purchase to add storage and meet the requirements of all of them."

No Solution? Build Your Own
Rorke Data decided the best way to meet the needs of television stations was to build its own solution. The solution Rorke Data created is called StreamMine. StreamMine includes a server, manufactured by Rorke Data, which performs specific functions for encoding and decoding video. StreamMine software, which is also manufactured by Rorke Data, is added to the server. Completing the solution is a DVD library manufactured by Asaca (Golden, CO).

"We designed a two-sided software application," says Rorke. "The software connects to a broadcast server environment on one side and a library [normally DVD-RAM] on the other. StreamMine augments the storage capacity of the video server via the DVD library. When we plug StreamMine into their video server, the video server immediately thinks it has gained storage capacity." A basic StreamMine solution gives a video server about 3,600 hours of additional storage. StreamMine does not replace anything; it simply extends the existing capacity of the video server. StreamMine can be connected to all of a company's video servers, regardless of manufacturer. The solution also enables automated tape to MPEG conversions. Customers can connect a video deck to StreamMine and copy video footage into the StreamMine system. The content will be formatted and filed on the DVD library, converting a station's legacy tapes to digital format.

DVD Is The Media Of Choice
When deciding which library to use in its solutions, Rorke Data opted to partner with Asaca. "We did extensive testing on all of the DVD-RAM libraries and felt Asaca was the right choice," says Rorke. "The main reason is durability. The Asaca library is an industrial-class machine. Most broadcast stations have to run 24/7. They cannot afford any downtime, and their library cannot have problems. If a station is streaming video from one of our libraries and there is a problem, the end result is a blank screen in the broadcast room. That situation is simply unacceptable. We ran several libraries through a variety of tests, and the Asaca unit performed the best."

Another reason Rorke Data chose Asaca was the raw capacity of the library and its ability to deliver video. "It is not good enough to just look at the raw capacity of the library," says Rorke. "VARs also have to look at the resolution of the video and the library's delivery rate. These factors matter to the end user, because faster means less capacity. Most stations want higher quality, but they need to understand there is a trade-off with capacity. One StreamMine configuration can store 3,800 hours of video with a transfer rate of 8 Mb/s. However, the capacity drops to 2,900 hours at 10 Mb/s and 2,000 hours at 15 Mb/s."

Consolidation And Increased Speed
Although there are some applications where tape might make more sense for archiving, that is not the case in broadcasting. "In a broadcast environment where video clips are being played, DVD-RAM is far and away the best choice," says Rorke. "Locating and playing clips is faster, and all of the video footage can be consolidated into a large digital repository. The editing software most newsrooms use will search for digital video clips with time stamps and time lines. Those features are provided for when storing clips on DVD. The automation software will schedule the clips while the editing software allows employees to put the story together."

Rorke Data has performed 15 StreamMine installations and gets additional referrals from each one. Public broadcasting is a pretty tight-knit group, and when one station finds a solution they like, they tell others about it. However, not every StreamMine customer is involved in broadcasting. "We also have corporate customers who are interested in the solution," says Rorke. "Many corporate customers have rooms full of video that they would like to make digital for quicker and easier access."