365 Media, Iceland’s largest media organization, has installed Front Porch Digital’s DIVArchive and DIVAdirector at the heart of its new all-digital broadcast workflow. 365 Media’s Front Porch Digital installation provides a comprehensive content storage management (CSM) solution with archiving, transcoding, and browsing for the broadcaster’s news, current affairs, sports, and entertainment programming.

Tightly integrated with 365 Media’s editing, automation, and playout systems, DIVArchive and DIVAdirector provide concurrent access for 15 journalists on the news floor, while up to 10 post-production editors can access the archive simultaneously from their Final Cut Pro systems. Content is ingested directly into the archive for production use, and finished pieces are restored to the playout servers under the control of the automation system.

Based in Moscow, Channel One is Russia’s most widely viewed television station, featuring 30 news bulletins per day, international hits, and its own productions, which include some of Russia’s most popular feature films. At Channel One, DIVArchive middleware enables a unified CSM system, allowing content to be ingested, stored, managed, converted, and made available to newsroom, editing systems, and digital media workflow applications.

At Channel One, the DIVArchive solution consists of one Manager, which maintains the database, manages application requests, and controls storage resources; and eight Actors, which move content between media servers and storage in a Sun StorageTek SL8500 tape library with eight T10000 tape drives. As configured, the DIVArchive can sustain throughputs as high as 7,680 Mbps.

ESPN started operating in Brazil in 1989 launching the ESPN International channel, and in 1995, ESPN Brasil started its operation. Today, the brand is also present in several platforms such as radio (together with Rádio Eldorado), mobile (video downloads, SMS, and WAP), and also on the Internet (www.espn.com.br and ESPN360 broadband platform). ESPN in Brazil belongs to the ESPN International division created in 1988 as a branch of ESPN Inc. in the markets outside the U.S.

“DIVArchive, with excellent support from Front Porch Digital and the local LineUp team, has enabled delivery of the cost-effective and reliable solution we were hoping for. By digitizing our videotape archive and then relying on DIVArchive to manage it, we are furthering our goals of preserving and securing content, finding and retrieving individual clips readily, and saving space and staff time.” said Victor Hannoun, director of operations, ESPN.

Global Television is part of CanWest Global Communications Corp., Canada's largest media company. Besides Global, CanWest also owns, operates, and/or holds substantial interests in Canada’s largest publisher of daily newspapers, and conventional television, out-of-home advertising, specialty cable channels, Web sites and radio stations, and networks in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Turkey, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

At Global TV, DIVArchive will be implemented at four regional broadcast centers spread out across Canada’s five and one-half time zones and linked with high-speed connectivity. The four centers, located in Vancouver (CHAN), Toronto (CIII), Edmonton (CITV), and Calgary (CICT), will ingest and play out digital news content produced by all of Global Television’s 14 stations. Under the new workflow, each of the four broadcast centers is expected to process as much as five times the content it is processing now.

Today, with 23 channels and more than 1,000 employees, Globosat leads the Brazilian Pay-TV market. Its audience comprises 12.5 million viewers distributed among more than 3.6 million households in the country. Launched in 1991, Globosat delivers entertainment, information, and leisure programming via channels including Telecine, SporTV, GNT, Multishow, Globo News, Universal Channel, Shoptime, and Canal Brazil.

“After evaluating content storage management technologies and formulating our own strategy, we chose Front Porch Digital for their reputation in the Brazilian market and because DIVArchive was the most flexible and scalable solution for our future development,” said Lourenço Carvano, technology manager at Globosat. “Since its inception in 1991, Globosat has been a pioneer in Brazilian broadcasting, and the DIVArchive system will enable us to continue the technical innovation that has helped us achieve our success to date.”

HOT, one of Israel’s leading telecommunications and cable companies, has installed Front Porch Digital’s DIVArchive system and DIVAdirector at the core of its new transmission system. The HOT master head-end, based in Petach Tikva, supports a channel lineup that includes HOT’s house and community channels, each customized for five different zones of the country, as well as children’s programming and movie, science, student-oriented, cultural, music, and entertainment channels.

DIVArchive and DIVAdirector provide content storage management for HOT’s 20 channels, integrating with a Harris automation system and Omneon video servers. The new system was brought on-air without disrupting HOT’s 24/7 program schedule of 20 original channels and 16 promo channels and is designed for future scaling up to HD broadcast.

Tel Aviv-based IETV (Israel Educational Television) has installed, with the help of system integrator AVcom, an entirely digital tapeless production workflow using Front Porch Digital’s DIVArchive content storage management system. Israel’s first national television station, operating continually since 1965, IETV broadcasts around 215 hours of documentaries, drama, and other educational programming each week, and went on-air with the new production system in August 2007.

Shlomo Kasif, CTO of IETV commented, “Managing file-based content with DIVArchive and DIVAdirector gives us the most powerful and flexible way of viewing, retrieving, and transferring material during production, as well as preparing it for transmission. Front Porch Digital’s technology integrates readily with our existing systems to become the hub of a tapeless workflow that is far simpler, faster, and more cost-effective to operate. No other vendor delivers the same level of advanced workflow, integration, and performance.”

Lagardère Active, the broadcasting division of leading French media group Lagardère, has installed Front Porch Digital’s DIVArchive system (Distributed Intelligent Versatile Archive) as part of a major makeover of its audiovisual archive facilities. Lagardère Active is the leading French producer of prime-time drama and comedy, operating 11 special-interest television channels and 16 production companies, and is also a creator of interactive content.

Lagardère Active began a phased migration from its previous archiving system in May 2005, replacing it with a DIVArchive system and integrating it with a Sony automation system and video server with 100 TB of storage on a Sun StorageTek library at the broadcaster’s Paris facility. In the most recent phase, Lagardère extended functionality of its archive system with the addition of a disaster recovery facility, based upon Front Porch Digital’s DIVAnet solution, that came into service in February 2007.

MusiquePlus, Canada’s hip French-language music station, has installed DIVArchive™ from Front Porch Digital to support automated workflow of digitized video content across a complex web of ingest, storage, and delivery platforms. At MusiquePlus, DIVArchive is the key to a complete transformation from tape-based to tapeless workflow that will dramatically improve efficiency and broadcast consistency at the station, as well as enabling it to more readily take advantage of new delivery options.

Systems integrator Applied Electronics collaborated with MusiquePlus to devise an innovative workflow in which DIVArchive is directed by ProConsultant’s LOUISE integrated traffic scheduler. Working in the background, DIVArchive identifies content by its metadata and handles it according to customized rules developed by MusiquePlus — making copies for archives or for browsing, and/or transcoding the content for streaming to the Web, to mobile phones, or even via FTP to the Montreal airport’s TV monitors that entertain passengers in the gate area with music programming.

NASCAR Media Group, which provides production services and content generation for the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, has selected Front Porch Digital’s DIVArchive to manage storage of incoming footage as well as an irreplaceable archive containing more than 50,000 hours of NASCAR film and video, some dating as far back as 1948 when NASCAR was founded. The Front Porch solution will underpin transition to a tapeless workflow to be completed in time for NASCAR Media Group’s move in 2009 from its current Charlotte, N.C., facility to the tower of the NASCAR Plaza, now under construction in the same city.

The NARA audio/video preservation laboratory, located in College Park, Md., stores videotape made by almost every agency of the federal government — from the military, to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to the Department of Agriculture. Made as long as 30 years ago, generations of videotapes have begun to deteriorate. The overall goal of the project is to forestall further losses swiftly and cost effectively and to enable easier access to the content.

Front Porch Digital’s SAMMA robot will provide an easy, automated means of creating preservation-quality digital files from the videotapes. Because it can work day and night unattended, the SAMMA robot is well-suited for a high-volume job like this one.

The Newseum — a 250,000-square-foot museum of news — offers visitors an experience that blends five centuries of news history with up-to-the-second technology and hands-on exhibits. The Newseum is located at the intersection of Pennsylvania Avenue and Sixth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C., on America’s Main Street between the White House and the U.S. Capitol and adjacent to the Smithsonian museums on the National Mall. The exterior’s unique architectural features include a 74-foot-high marble engraving of the First Amendment and an immense front wall of glass through which passers-by can watch the museum fulfill its mission of providing a forum where the media and the public can gain a better understanding of each other. The Newseum features seven levels of galleries, theaters, retail spaces, and visitor services. It offers a unique environment that takes museum goers behind the scenes to experience how and why news is made.

The Newseum integration is an unusual one for DIVArchive. Instead of a traditional MAM application, Newseum relies on Artesia asset management, which was designed with management of hard assets such as museum artifacts in mind. DIVArchive’s open architecture enabled the smooth integration with Artesia, which is also directing Thomson Grass Valley K2 servers, Nexsan SATABoy near-line storage, and a Sun SL500 digital tape library.

Reshet, one of Israel’s most successful broadcasters, has established an all-digital tapeless production environment with Front Porch Digital’s DIVArchive and DIVAdirector providing a facilitywide content storage management (CSM) and transcoding solution. A joint concessionary operating Israel’s most popular station, Channel 2, Reshet moved to a tapeless environment to increase efficiency and competitiveness in the country’s high-pressure broadcasting industry.

RFO employs more than 1,500 professionals at 10 regional stations spread out over three oceans to paint the colors of the world on television and radio. Ten regional stations (Guadeloupe, French Guiana, Martinique, Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, Reunion Island, Mayotte, French Polynesia, New Caledonia, Wallis and Futuna, and Paris), two television networks, two radio networks, and a satellite network make RFO a major player in the landscape of French overseas territories and departments.

RFO adopted Front Porch Digital’s flagship DIVArchive (Distributed Intelligent Versatile Archive) system almost 10 years ago at its stations in Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana, and at its headquarters in Paris. Now, the simultaneous implementation of four DIVAworks Professional systems elsewhere represents a significant expansion, which — based on the infinite scalability of DIVA’s modular architecture — eventually will provide a platform for an enterprise-wide system of easily accessible shared content.

Since 1980, the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo — the world’s largest livestock show and richest regular-season PRCA rodeo — has produced its own television programming both for broadcast and for the historical record, amassing tens of thousands of hours of content stored on videotape in multiple formats. The content represents the scope of the 20-day event that takes place at Houston’s Reliant Park every March, including not only footage of the rodeo competition but associated performances by musicians from Gene Autry to Beyoncé Knowles, and auctions of everything from champion steers to chardonnay.

UBF, the second-largest broadcast post operation in the Netherlands, is operating a DIVArchive content storage management system from Front Porch Digital in its purpose-built facility in Hilversum. The DIVArchive system underpins an all-new production workflow, created by UBF to service its clients’ requirements for an infrastructure capable of supporting industry-leading production standards in the competitive sports broadcast field.

UBF will also expand the use of the DIVArchive to the company’s Avid Isis-Interplay production platform. Making versatile use of the archive from different production platforms is crucial for managing tight budgets, meeting early deadlines, and living up to high performance demands.

The VOA is a multimedia international broadcasting service funded by the U.S. government. Produced in 45 languages, VOA news, informational, educational, and cultural programming is broadcast approximately 1,500 hours a week to an estimated audience of more than 134 million people worldwide. VOA is large, logistically complex — with round-the-clock news deadlines — and required to abide by the federal government’s recordkeeping requirements. As a result, the VOA faces multiple challenges when it comes to identifying, storing, and affording appropriate access to media content.

At VOA, DIVArchive will move assets between Omneon media servers and a Spectra® T950 tape library under the direction of Dalet® media asset management. Initially, the workflow will be configured with 13 TB of nearline SAN and 3500 hours of storage on LTO-4 datatapes.

Woodbine’s television operation employs 110 people who produce 11,500 hours of live television every year, most of it for local races, but also thoroughbred and standardbred races from around the world. Since 2006, relevant current content has been loaded into the DIVArchive system. Currently in the works is a long-term plan to make historic material accessible as well, eliminating the expense of tape and tape maintenance in addition to the complications and delays posed by tape machines.

Front Porch Digital’s DIVArchive system is ideal for this environment because it makes it easy for a new user with no specialized technical knowledge to browse, identify, and retrieve clips from a familiar desktop interface. It also makes it easy to link complex and varied metadata to the content. A thoroughbred breeder looking to generate a future contender with particular attributes may, for example, wish to browse clips of every mare that has won a turf race by more than two lengths on a rainy day. DIVArchive couple with DIVAdirector makes this possible.

Germany’s national public television broadcaster ZDF (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen) has installed Front Porch Digital’s DIVArchive as part of a content storage management system linking its Mainz broadcasting base to a network of bureaux and the major editorial studios in Berlin, Düsseldorf, and Munich. The DIVArchive system makes ZDF’s television archive available to over 1400 staff, providing search and browsing access, and enabling selective high-resolution restore facilities for news, current affairs, education, and entertainment programming.

DIVArchive underpins the management of video, audio, and metadata in ZDF’s workflow, interfacing with Avid video servers and editing systems, and providing automated transcoding of material. To facilitate ZDF’s requirement for storage in a non-proprietary and future-proof format, DIVArchive transcodes clips to a standard DV format encapsulated in an MXF wrapper when transferring material.