Prime Minister´s Office

CONTEXT

The Press Department of the Prime Minister (Presidente del Gobierno) is conduting an exhaustive process of recording, organising and editing of audiovisual content, generated by various media sources that affect the National Government.

Until the introduction of Videoma, the content was processed in an analogue format. With the imminent arrival of the Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT/DVB-T) and the termination of the analogue service, it was necessary to perform a transfer to a system that would be able to adapt to the new demands of the DTT, and allow the growth of the number of channels to be recorded and to be stored in the future.

For this purpose and as a central media management software, the Ministry of the Presidency trusted in Videoma Broadcast Monitor for the recording and monitoring of 36 channels 24 hours per day recording and with defined time slots.

THE SOLUTION

An Exterity based terrestrial DVB-T signal reception system was installed, allowing the selection of all services and channels transmitted in a transport stream (satellite or DVB-T) and assigning a multicast IP address to every channel. The channels can now be assigned to a recorder on the recording server, or viewed using any streaming client in the network.

Intake

The Multicast Intake Module of Videoma Broadcast Monitor divides the streamed content into different segments, of a certain length, as defined by the recording units. The recorded material is being precatalogued in the database with the searchable metadata information of recording date and time.

The Recording Units are based on AXE 210 SGI technology devices, and configured to have a backup to prevent data loss in case of a device failure.

A recording subsystem based on two MPEG2 Transport Stream servers, configured in redundant mode and managed by the Videoma Broadcast Monitor application was provided. The recording servers are connected to the storage system in redundant mode with a Fibre Channel connection.

All MPEG2 Transport Stream traffic generated by the demultiplexers and encoders, can be recorded on a streaming recording server, which controls the archive and documentation system storage at the same time. This prevents too high traffic that would otherwise cause bottlenecks.

Storage

The size of the storage subsystem was calculated to record two TV channels over 30 days, 24 hours per day, and to record 24 channels over 30 days, 14 hours per day. This represented approximately 384 daily hours of video.

Additionally, 9 radio stations were to be recorded for 30 days, 24 hours per day, which would amount to 216 hours per day. The total capacity of this near line storage system was 36 TB. The recording quality was identical with the emission quality.

A different storage system with similar characteristics as the one described above, was installed to record and store data emitted by the national and regional Channels during the legally regulated time of four daily hours. The system was configured to record, provide access to the recordings, archive and manage all recorded data for 75 days. The storage capacity had to be 45 days longer than the one of the previously described system, a time period that would require the recording of 19.170 hours.

A Windows Media encoding with a bit rate of 768 Kbits was used for the permanent storage of all recorded material. Calculating that 60% of the daily recordings would be permanently stored, the required storage space would have to big enough to record 33,384 hours of TV, and approximately 189,216 hours of radio transmissions.

Calculating with a necessary space of 0,33 GB for the storage of one hour of television transmission, and a necessary space of 0,12 GB for one hour of radio transmission, the total space needed for permanent storage amounted to 173,63 TB. This storage space was provided by a Spectralogic T200 library.

In order to keep the permanently stored content available, data was virtualized to guarantee access from any PC in the network. This virtualization was done using CXFS / HSM servers with clustering and virtualization software for all volumes. With a shared volume system it was possible to enable recording and access of the recorded content at the same time with a reliability of 99%.

AXE 210 SGI servers were chosen for the installation of Videoma Broadcast Monitor. For the transcoding of the recorded files in MPEG2, to permanently stored, encoded files in Windows Media format, were used servers based on SGI LSX-BASE-310 technology. These servers collect the files from the near line storage and place them in the permanent storage once they have been transcoded to Windows Media at 768 kbits, where they are available for online viewing.

MANAGEMENT

Videoma Broadcast Monitor manages all channels rerouting over multicast IP addresses and schedules the recording of television and radio signals that are available on the multicast network. It also includes a viewer for television channels or radio stations and all the already stored material. The data can be viewed live or on demand. Overview over live TV channels is displayed in a thumbnail view.

The system makes it possible to organize the content by topics and to create customize metadata fields. This allows the users to tag the contents to simplify later search tasks. The platform administrator defines a metadata schema to assign information to the recorded material. Users accessing the archived media databank can then search this information: channel name, broadcasting time and date or metadata to find the desired element.