Omneon, Front Porch Digital Announce Collaboration

Front Porch Digital and Omneon have collaborated to offer a solution that combines their flagship products for active storage and content management. As a result of the deal, the Omneon MediaGrid storage system and the Front Porch Digital DIVArchive content storage management (CSM) system have now been tested together and implemented with leading broadcasters worldwide, including NRK in Norway, ESPN in Singapore, TVI in Portugal, Arqiva in the UK, and DISH Network in the US.

The integration of the two systems gives broadcasters and other media companies with extremely fast access to archived content, something especially important in fast-paced media environments such as news and sports production.

"The holy grail for media companies is instant access to all their content, even material that has been in an archive for many years," said Mike Knaisch, president of Front Porch Digital. "Digital file-based workflows have long offered to deliver on this dream, and with the scalability and availability of storage offered through the MediaGrid system, combined with the performance of DIVArchive, reality is fast approaching that ideal."

The combined DIVArchive/MediaGrid system is suitable for a number of content management applications: using MediaGrid as online/nearline storage, with DIVArchive managing and controlling movement of content to playout servers or editing and graphics workstations; or DIVArchive managing the flow of content from archive storage to and from the MediaGrid, as well as the copying and movement of content to remote mirrored sites for disaster recovery operations.

"The main assets of a media company reside in the content it owns, but the value of that content depends on more than just the quality of the material; if you cannot find a specific clip or get that clip to where it's needed, then it has no value at all," said Geoff Stedman, senior vice president for products and markets at Omneon. "Together, Front Porch and Omneon have created the complete package for content access, management, and protection."