Submitted by
NBC Universal
Runner-up: Turner
Submitted by: AmberFin
During the 2008 Beijing Olympics, NBC Universal set a precedent for successfully delivering content across platforms. An ambitious infrastructure allowed content to be recorded and ingested in China to a digital media storage array. It instantly became available to the many systems and users requiring media files and finally delivered in the correct formats to various new media outlets.
Omneon MediaDecks ingested feeds at the IBC, while the MediaGrid provided 180TB of storage in China and 120TB of storage in New York. Blue Order Media,along with Cyradis, OPIS and IDS, used the schedules created in ScheduALL to manage the media files, generate statistic metadata and create the EDLs read by MOG Solutions, which auto composited the high-quality essence based on instruction. Stats metadata was merged with the streaming files created by Digital Rapids for unified display on NBCOlympics.com by CMS provider Deltatre.
During the ingest process in China, shot pickers in NY screened, logged and produced the content for digital distribution using low-res proxy files created by the MediaDecks. Conformed SD and HD video, images and EDLs were sent to Avid using Cisco WAAS for more finished edits and/or to the Anystream system for transcoding for new media outlets. Anystream's Velocity, located at Englewood Cliffs, NJ, auto-ingested production metadata entered by producers at 30 Rock via a customized MS application. Based on the metadata, Velocity instructed Agility to transcode the correct format. After each transcode passed quality assurance, distribution packages, which included thumbnails, various resolutions of Windows Media, MPEG-2 video and XMLs, were auto published by Velocity based on an outlet's requirement to MCDS. MCDS, an in-house application powered by Signiant, sent out packages to the appropriate outlets, such as NBC Direct. For VOD packages, all 50Hz content was standards-converted through a Snell & Wilcox Mach 1, controlled by Agility and re-encoded as 60Hz with ad-stitching for delivery to the appropriate cable VOD outlets.
