T3Media (Video)

Headquartered in Denver, T3Media (previously Thought Equity Motion) works with more than 400 rights holders, including some of the world’s largest media companies. The company increases the value of video content through its advanced technology platform and licensing services. The company delivers large scale archive management and “smart content” metadata tools as a cloud service, providing greater control with reduced cost and complexity. Through its web platform and global sales force, the company licenses sports, news, entertainment, editorial, and creative content to the world’s leading media producers.

Video Transcript

Mark Lemmons, Chief Technology Officer, Thought Equity Motion

0:14

Thought Equity Motion has the largest file-storage and delivery platform of digital, production-quality files that is commercially available in the world. We are headquartered in Denver, Colorado, with operations globally. We have over a million digital video assets that anyone in the world can come in and browse.

0:33

Thought Equity Motion is growing rapidly, both as a business and in terms of our storage infrastructure. So, that’s a real challenge. We use technology to insure a very high service level. Increasingly, we’re using IBM’s LTF to do that.

0:46

Literally, when you come into Thought Equity and get a clip, you’re moving robots behind the scenes that are grabbing a tape, putting it in a drive and they’re storing that file for you to download.

0:57

At Thought Equity Motion we’re talking about building an over-one-million digital asset library for people to download on demand. We have to first, get digital files to make them accessible. Increasingly, we’re using LTO-5 and LTFS to do that. The reason for this is that so on an on-demand basis we have ready access to any material in the library and we’re no more than a few feet from any file in the system.

1:21

The IT demands of Thought Equity Motion are a little bit different than your average IT shop, I think. We can really see 100 petabytes right around the corner for us. But we also have to do that cost-effectively across a bunch of different media companies. So we can’t put the kinds of constraints on our IT environment that you might find at, say, a bank, where you can normalize the files that you’re storing.

1:44

With LTFS from IBM, I can literally integrate my global storage strategy, because the only way to crack 100 petabytes is by doing it in more than one location. For Thought Equity Motion, IBM LTO-5 and LTFS is really plug and play. Now that LTFS is increasingly supported in IBM’s library products, you can apply the sort of scale you’ve had with proprietary systems but now with an open-file system. This is important, not just tactically because it’s easy to use, but strategically, because it’s low-cost.

2:17

We used to literally have a fleet of hard drives in cases, and these were both insecure and expensive and broke down and, well, LTO-5 doesn’t break. You can ship it, you can re-use it. We can deploy very low-cost solutions in the field that integrate with our high-scale IT systems back in our data centers in Wyoming. That’s what we really like about LTO-5.

2:39

Thought Equity Motion sees immediate, tangible economic benefit from our LTF deployments today. The first place we saw that was in retiring fleets of hard drives. The second place we saw that was in the cost per gigabyte of content acquisition in the field, which has dropped dramatically, by a factor of 80 percent.

3:00

IBM LTFS allows us to federate the archive and that works our clients but it also works for us because we can keep multiple copies of the files in several geographic locations and they all share an open file system.

3:17

Without IBM’s LTFS technology, we’d be in a world of hurt. And, frankly, the real innovation in the market has at least as much to do with the business model of storage as it does with the underlying architecture of it. And IBM and LTF really combined both necessary innovations for us. So, high degree of flexibility, high degree of interoperability; it’s fantastic.