For the third time in a row, NBC Olympics, the US broadcaster of the Olympics Games, used Blue Order’s Media Archive Enterprise Media Management platform to ingest, log and archive live video content during the Olympic Winter Games in Torino which closed last week.
Having used a similar system supplied by Blue Order at the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics in 2002 and the Athens Summer Olympics in 2004, NBC Olympics used the new Media Archive 3.0 for its coverage of the Torino Winter Games. New features in 3.0 that NBC took advantage of included: the Media Archive SOAP API for realtime import of third-party manual logs as well as automated sports data feeds supplied by Information and Display Systems (IDS) LLC; and the new Media Archive support for ingesting video with discontinuous time code, while still maintaining the correct association with all the live time-coded logging and results metadata.
David Mazza, SVP Engineering at NBC Olympics, says it has been a success: “For the first time, at the Torino Olympics, NBC’s facility at the International Broadcast Center migrated to an all HD infrastructure for recording incoming venue feeds. Blue Order helped us manage this transition by enabling more of our producers to work on desktop PCs using proxies for making their content selection and rough edit decisions, and by automating parts of the logging process. With Media Archive, we chose the right MAM platform for us – as our workflows evolve, we use more and more of its potential.”
NBC Olympics Director of Technology Matt Adams added, “With Media Archive 3.0 Blue Order has provided the tools that enabled us, with the help of Media Strategy Partners LLC (MSP), our provider of overall MAM solution architecture and project management for the last two Olympics, to integrate it with our Cyradis Technology automation system, MOG Solutions MPEG-4 encoders, our preexisting OPIS logging database, and now the live results and scoring information provided by IDS.
“Archive makes the metadata created in those systems accessible via a single portal, facilitating realtime access to video content for NBC’s producers working anywhere on the NBC LAN during the Games. This enabled us to support our colleagues at NBC News, working in a separate building in Torino, by giving them access to Media Archive for making their rough edits and then digitising and pushing only the high-resolution files they needed.”
