Golf Channel, the cable TV network owned by NBC Universal, has deployed a Curator Production Asset Management system to provide fast turnaround for its live sports production, writes Adrian Pennington.
Following the implementation of a live browse and logging project by Cambridge, UK-based metadata software vendor IPV in January, Golf Channel is adding IPV’s Curator at its broadcast facility in Florida.
Curator enables the search of media from a common user interface and the initiation of manual and automated workflows. At Golf Channel, the IPV system consolidates metadata and material from Avid Interplay, Avid AirSpeed and ISIS, Dixon Sports Computing’s sports logger, Front Porch Digital’s DIVArchive, and the existing library system.
“We were keen to implement a single management point across our operations,” said Ken Botelho, senior director of engineering, Golf Channel. “Curator’s ability to search media and metadata across different databases and ingest points and have this media readily available at the desktop was essential to our collaborative production process. These files are made instantaneously available to operators annotating, bookmarking and cutting the highlights packages, even while the material is still ingesting.”
The installation at Golf Channel includes a file-based transcoding XCode and streaming engine from IPV that is capable of ingesting live and growing media files to provide instant browse access while high-resolution files are still being recorded.
Material is ingested onto an Avid Interplay and ISIS network and the XCodes transcode the live files within the Avid network as the record starts. Dixon’s sports logger adds metadata as the action is being captured.
“The challenge for sports broadcasters in particular has been how to create a frame-accurate growing browse of an indeterminate length of live content coming into a facility,” explained Nigel Booth, executive VP, sales and marketing, IPV. “The benefit of the solution being installed at Golf Channel is that these live streams can be paused, scrubbed, annotated and shuttled back and forth to the record point to ensure that all the actions and plays are captured as close to live as possible.”
