Czech Television Image
ACCELERATING CONCURRENT
WORKLOADS FOR ESCALATING
MEDIA BROADCAST AND
PRODUCTION DEMANDS

CZECH TELEVISION

“The best product is the one you forget about because it simply works—and that’s DDN.”

–Jaroslav Sladek, Video Department Chief for Czech Television

As the public television broadcaster in the Czech Republic, Czech Television delivers six channels of news, sports, family, arts, and educational content. The organization produces more than two-thirds of its programming using state-of-the-art television production technologies and services, including ultra-high-definition (UHD) formats. In addition, Czech TV is a leader in hybrid viewing, with more than 87,000 hours of recordings archived for on-demand distribution to smart phones and hybrid TVs.

At the top of Czech TV’s workflow challenges was the explosion of digital video content and data-intensive demands of new, high-end production equipment. In particular, the move to 4K uncompressed DPX workflows created a major spike in storage requirements, since the size of native raw files quadrupled as well as the performance required by the storage. Despite the massive data influx, Czech TV still had to guarantee flawless real-time workflows of concurrent UHD video streams—across ingest, editing, transcoding, distributing, and archiving. Learn how Czech TV partnered with DDN to address these challenges with an updated, shared storage system with reliable, robust performance to accelerate collaborative, concurrent workloads.

CHALLENGES

  • Surge of digital video content and high-end video equipment spurred the need for fast, scalable, robust, and reliable storage
  • Simultaneous support for data-intensive color correction and film restoration services required on-demand scale-out and scale-up performance
  • Desire existed for simple, seamless storage to keep pace with modern media workflows and concurrent client workloads

SOLUTION

DDN’s MEDIAScaler parallel file system serves as an all-in-one, high-performance storage appliance with streamlined deployment; provides fast, efficient support for around-the-clock operations; and has the ability to scale to capacity; and performance on-demand keeps pace with a wide variety of media workflows.
Czech TV Workflow

BUSINESS BENEFITS

  • Production teams readily manage multiple, high-end 4K workflows without bottlenecks
  • Integrated platform enables use of a single system for data ingest, color correction, film restoration, transcoding, and finalizing media files
  • Ability to add workflows on demand keeps pace with growing broadcast and production needs
  • Getting away from legacy SAN FC-based technologies makes CzechTV have a very low TCO

TECHNICAL BENEFITS

  • Up to five workstations doing real-time 4K DPX can work concurrently with no performance hit
  • DDN’s integrated parallel file system ensures seamless integration with Diamant, Baselight, Bone, Clipster, Avid DS, and other critical media applications
  • The ability to accelerate multiple data access applications on the same centrally stored files without need for copying or serial locking
  • The ability to integrate new clients on demand helps avoid any rigidity
  • OpenFlow support ensures fast, flexible path to open networking in the future

MORE MEDIA SUCCESS STORIES

PRODUCTS USED

INDUSTRY