The Media Access Project at the UK’s Channel 4 Television, a new installation centered on the Pharos Mediator media management system, has gone live.
The objective of the project was to create and maintain tapeless storage of all Channel 4 programs so they could be made available in any format.
The Pharos Mediator was deployed for SD and will soon handle HD content. It controls the ingest server, content store, archive server, Sony Petasite tape robotics and transfer management. The system can archive up to 18 months of MXF 50i programs.
Incoming programs and interstitials are ingested at full 50Mb/s I-frame MPEG-2 transmission resolution to a 36TB Isilon server storage cluster. Content is held on an Isilon disk cluster before being automatically transcoded to 15Mb/s long GOP MPEG-2 for playout via the existing Pinnacle server system.
For more information, visit: www.pharos-comms.com.
