Blue Order to Provide Media Archive 3.0 for NBC’s Coverage of the Torino Olympic Winter Games

For the third time in a row, NBC Olympics, the US broadcaster of the Olympics Games, has 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. Having used a similar system supplied by Blue Order successfully at the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics in 2002 and the Athens Summer Olympics in 2004, NBC Olympics used the brand 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 real-time 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 huge 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 has 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’ve chosen the right MAM platform for us – as our workflows evolve, we use more and more of its potential.”

“Media Archive is the central MAM platform in our system architecture. 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 MPEG4 encoders, our preexisting OPIS logging database, and now the live results and scoring information provided by IDS” explains Matt Adams, Director of Technology at NBC Olympics. “Media Archive makes the metadata created in those systems accessible via a single portal, facilitating real-time access to video content for NBC’s producers working anywhere on the NBC LAN during the Games. This has 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 digitizing and pushing only the high-resolution files they need.”

A feature NBC Olympics has pioneered at Torino is the insertion of live sports data supplied by IDS from the Host’s Internet Data Feed, into the MAM platform. Craig Lau, VP Information Technology at NBC Olympics, explains: “We worked with MSP, IDS and Blue Order to have IDS feed live sports data – that is the athletes’ names, their positions in the competition and their scores, for example – directly into Media Archive, using Media Archive´s SOAP API. It works flawlessly, and the benefits are huge – with the statistical data being associated automatically with the timeline of the video, our loggers don’t have to re-enter it, and our producers and journalists have instant access to both the browse video and the sports data feeds, all presented side by side in Media Archive’s unique storyboard view.” Having found what they are looking for, users can put together EDLs by dragging and dropping storyboard segments directly into an EDL.

Another purpose of the system is creating a library of Olympics content for re-use after the Games, adding to the footage recorded during previous Olympics Games. “One of the challenges here was that we needed a MAM system which could handle both PAL and NTSC content in one system – Olympics Games are recorded in either PAL or NTSC, depending on where they take place. Media Archive recognizes the difference but otherwise makes available the same functionality for both video standards – which is exactly what we need” says Matt Adams.

Based on open standards, Blue Order’s Media Archive is a highly scalable, distributed Enterprise Media Management platform. At Torino, Media Archive 3.0 has been tightly integrated with Cyradis’ CTG-1000 VMS automation system which controls the MOG Solutions MPEG-4 encoders, with IDS-provided results, and with NBC Olympics’ legacy information system, OPIS. While feeds are being recorded onto up to 32 parallel HDCAM VTRs, at the same time MXF MPEG-4 browse proxies at 2 Mbit/s are created using the MOG proxy encoders under the control of Cyradis. Both the videocassettes and the browse proxy are automatically registered with Media Archive. Keyframes are extracted instantly from the browse proxy, and both are made available instantly for retrieval, browsing and EDL creation. The metadata entered into the automation system is also transferred to Media Archive, which automatically associates this metadata and the essence files with the metadata sets from the OPIS database and the sports data feeds provided by IDS. This way, Media Archive becomes an electronic catalog of NBC’s Olympics Games archive, allowing content to be delivered to all networked users for viewing, access and re-use.

“For us at Blue Order, this was another exciting – and most rewarding - project. Last year, NBC Olympics challenged us to take MAM to the next level for Torino 2006, and based on Media Archive 3.0, we have delivered. We expect to see more use of our technology for life sports events coverage in the near future” says Rainer A. Kellerhals, Executive Vice President Products & Solutions at Blue Order.