Italian pay-TV provider SKY Italia has deployed Omneon’s MediaGrid active storage system at the heart of its new file-based HD workflow.
The HD platform, located at SKY Italia’s new central facility in Milan, also relies on Omneon Spectrum HD media servers for ingest. SKY Italia, which is owned by News Corp., offers 24/7 broadcast of more than 170 channels of news and entertainment to more than 4.5 million subscribers.
At SKY Italia, both live and recorded SD and HD content is ingested to five Spectrum media servers with a combined total storage of 31TB. The 54TB MediaGrid active storage system, the first to be used in Italy, provides a nearline cache as well as media processing via the Omneon ProXchange application to repurpose content for other applications as needed.
The MediaGrid system, under direction of TMD asset management, interfaces with an SGL archive manager controlling a Spectra Logic archive system. SKY Italia is using its legacy server system and a fully redundant main and backup Spectrum media server system controlled by ADC automation for playout. The Spectrum and MediaGrid systems went live in June 2008.
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