TA3 Case Study

C.E.N. employs Spectra solution to preserver TA3 television content for the long-term
overview
C.E.N. is a commercial broadcaster in Bratislava, Slovakia. Owned by Grafobal Group, the largest non-financial company funded solely by Slovak capital, C.E.N. operates the all-news TV station TA3. TA3 Television provides local and foreign news covering a range of topics from finance to politics, economics, sports and culture. The channel has earned a reputation for offering independent, objective and verified reporting and was declared the most trusted media brand in Slovakia by the Reuters Institute for Research of Journalism in 2018. Launched by C.E.N. in 2001, TA3 has hosted a number of significant national and international figures throughout the years, including Larry King, American legend of television journalism, Ian Scott, former Director of the World Bank, ice hockey legend Stan Mikita and the biathlon World and Olympics champion Anastasia Kuzmina. TA3 actively cooperates with the world and European TV news leaders, e.g., CNN, Euronews, TF 1, CT24, and many others.

BlackPearl’s seamless integration with our Avid environment helped to simplify our growing content archive without disrupting news production and postproduction workflows. The solution enabled us to browse, find and retrieve content quickly, and minimized the challenges of scaling our archive inputs.

Radomir Polak, CTO, TA3

The Challenge

Archiving approximately four hours of XDCAM 50 footage per day, TA3 needed to scale its archive inputs and was facing archive workflow challenges. Their new storage environment needed to enable users to prepare archive assets, fill out searchable metadata and search and restore archived content all in one place. TA3 also wanted to be able to make use of low resolution playback of archived videos to facilitate playback performance and their editing process. The Slovak channel required an affordable storage solution that integrated seamlessly into their Avid post-production infrastructure, allowing them to use it as a universal, end-to-end interface for their news production and post-production workflows.

The Solution

Technology integrator Traco Systems worked to develop a solution that would fully connect all of TA3’s workflow applications under one umbrella. On the software side, the Traco Distribute Panel for Avid Media Central | Cloud UX together with Traco MediaBridge plug-in enabled the customer to use Octopus Newsroom to browse and deploy content from Avid Central platform and other production applications within a web browser-based graphic display that was easy to use and enabled users to drag and drop. It also gave users a highly optimized video production workflow for every stage in the production process from media ingest and scripting through to teleprompt presentation to content storage.

For its archive storage hardware, TA3 implemented a Spectra® BlackPearl® Converged Storage System and Spectra Tape Library with LTO-7 tape drives and media. The BlackPearl object-based solution’s powerful multi-tenancy capabilities unlock multiple on-premises and cloud storage targets in a single namespace, employing both NAS and S3- based interfaces.

The tight, certified integration between BlackPearl and MediaCentral reduces complexities to enable users to browse, find and retrieve content quickly. BlackPearl’s intelligent data policy management software enables users to determine how many copies will be made on each storage target and how long the data will reside, granting TA3 the ability to make two copies to tape in an automated manner. Their Spectra Tape Library provides high performance, density and dependability at an economical price. The complete Spectra storage solution provided TA3 with the affordable archive architecture it needed to successfully preserve its content long-term.

Environment Snapshot

  • Spectra BlackPearl Hybrid Storage Platform
  • Spectra Tape Library
  • LTO-7 tape drives and media
  • Avid MediaCentral
  • Traco Distribute Panel for Avid Media Central | Cloud UX
  • Octopus Newsroom
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