BBC Sport is one of the first of the broadcaster’s operations to move into its Salford Quays site near Manchester. As part of its core infrastructure is an Omneon MediaGrid active storage system which will provide around 1500 hours of HD storage. It will be used primarily for fast turnaround edits and highlights packages.The MediaGrid allows editing in place for Final Cut Pro, the preferred choice at the new facility. This provides a speed boost for high pressure editing by eliminating the need to load clips into the editor before work can start.Within the new BBC Sport live production workflow, sports events will be recorded onto EVS servers for logging and instant editing, and streamed to the Omneon MediaGrid. This architecture supports 36 simultaneous ingests with 200 journalists and producers searching using EVS IP Browse.The Omneon MediaGrid at Salford Quays has an aggregate bandwidth of 6Gb/s and a capacity of 96TB. “The BBC has relied on Omneon server systems for more than a decade,” said Geoff Stedman of Harmonic. “The MediaGrid offers the high performance and resilience that are critical in live broadcast applications, and we are confident it will provide the same performance for future sports broadcasts from Manchester.”
