SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- June 29, 2010 -- Omneon Inc. today announced that The Home Depot Inc., the world's largest home improvement specialty retailer, 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. In supporting production from start to finish, 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," said 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."
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(TM) server system, a 12-TB Omneon MediaGrid(TM) active storage system, the Omneon Media Application Server (MAS), and the Omneon ProXplore(TM) 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, in turn, 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.
"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," added Covey. "Omneon is a premier entity in broadcast environments, at the top of the heap when it comes to media storage and processing, and I am excited to be working with a company of its caliber."
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," said Geoff Stedman, senior vice president of marketing and business development at Omneon. "By optimizing HDTV's end-to-end file-based workflow and reducing the complexity of its production and broadcast operations, the Omneon platform will allow HDTV to make the most of its transition to tapeless."
More information about Omneon products and solutions is available at www.omneon.com.
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About The Home Depot
The Home Depot was founded in 1978 and began changing consumers' perspectives about how they could care for and improve their homes. The company created the "do-it-yourself" concept, spawning an entire industry that now spans the globe. Today, The Home Depot is the world's largest home improvement specialty retailer, with 2,244 retail stores in the United States (including Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands), Canada, Mexico, Guam and China. The Home Depot's stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: HD) and is included in the Dow Jones industrial average and Standard & Poor's 500 index. More information about the company is available at www.homedepot.com.
About Omneon Inc.
Omneon Inc. is a leading provider of scalable media server and active storage systems that optimize workflow productivity and on-air reliability for the production, distribution, and management of digital media. Omneon is a pioneer in the use of advanced IT technologies and open systems for broadcast applications, producing a modular and expandable video server architecture in the Omneon Spectrum media server. The Omneon MediaGrid active storage system delivers centralized content storage that is scalable in capacity, bandwidth, and media-processing power. The company has an extensive global presence with customers in more than 50 countries on six continents. Omneon is on the Web at www.omneon.com.
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