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Overview
Digital pioneer In today’s broadcasting industry, the move from analog to digital media is a compelling trend worldwide. One early adaptor in China is LiaoNing TV Station, (www.7x.cn) established in 1959 as one of the first five television stations on the Mainland. Its news channel reaches 270 million households all over China, while its other channels — for sports, business, city life, entertainment and science news — are broadcast to households throughout the LiaoNing province. Amid ever-increasing competition in China’s television industry, LiaoNing TV — considered a mid-size broadcaster with around 1000 employees — longed to set itself apart by moving to a digital media format. While its archive of analog tape content was extensive, the station’s producers did not have the means to quickly search the material for reuse. Making matters worse, the analog tape produced poor video quality. LiaoNing TV realized that the volume of content stored on analog tapes had tremendous unrealized value, and that moving to digital media could change all that. In fact, it could transform valuable but perishable and difficult-to-access content into reusable digital assets. Once converted, stored and thoroughly indexed, these digital assets could be more easily available and managed — and at a fraction of the cost of analog media. To achieve that end, the station needed a computing infrastructure capable of digitizing and managing archived analog content and new digital material for its broadcasts — with the goal of producing attractive new programs quickly, at a low cost.
In early 2004, with help from IBM and IBM Business Partner Jetsen Technology Ltd., also based in China, the LiaoNing TV Station implemented a digital media solution on its existing servers running Microsoft® Windows® 2000 and Microsoft Windows NT operating systems. IBM provided a solution based on its Open Digital Media Framework. This digital media system is designed to take advantage of IBM on demand technologies, allowing LiaoNing TV to better integrate operations, manage costs, become more resilient, and be more responsive to viewers’ changing appetites for news and entertainment programming. At the heart of this solution is storage — specifically, an affordable and flexible storage infrastructure that allows producers to capture, harness and preserve a rich array of digital content, on demand. Jetsen, in conjunction with the IBM digital media team, provided an online storage and near-line storage solution, along with a digital broadcasting system and broadcast asset management solution based on IBM DB2 Content Manager for AIX technology and the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager application. The solution also integrated hard disk array and tape library storage solutions. This solution enabled LiaoNing TV to build a centralized repository for rich media production and management, and which can be easily accessed, with appropriate permissions, across the organization. The entire solution is integrated with industry-leading editing and publishing tools, addressing the need to efficiently manage, reuse and repurpose content. Audio and video, on demand This transition — from analog to digital — represents a major change in how producers create programming. With the digital assets available at their desktop, LiaoNing TV’s producers and researchers find it easy to search and retrieve the content they need, when they need it, and to make sure the content they acquire can be reused quickly. The increased speed of searches, for example, has greatly impacted production efficiency. Under the old system, the process of searching through a library of archived analog tapes would normally take days to complete and likely yield dozens of tapes for review. Using digital media, that search takes only a matter of minutes. The end result is enormous savings in time and labor costs, while turning out timely, high quality programming to satisfy viewers. “We realized our library of analog tapes, which had great value, is difficult to access and utilize. IBM and an IBM Business Partner have helped us turn that content into valuable digital assets and, in the process, reduce production time and costs,” says Mr. Zhao, CTO of LiaoNing TV.
Resilient, scalable storage By going digital, LiaoNing TV station has become a more resilient operation as well. The storage management software from Jetsen, developed on the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager application, leverages Tivoli’s automatic unattended backup feature. This protects LiaoNing TV’s data from hardware failures and other errors by storing backup and archive copies of data within offline storage. Using the Tivoli Storage Manager application, LiaoNing TV has a scalable system that stores frequently used content in the high-speed disk array. The system can also detect infrequently used content and store it in LiaoNing TV’s tape library. This flexible, self-managing environment helps to support high levels of availability, so critical to news organizations operating on deadlines.
Channeling results With its digital media solution from IBM and the IBM Business Partner, LiaoNing TV Station built a complete platform for a digital television service using limited resources. The station expanded from six channels to add 40 digital feeds, increasing viewership without increasing the staff of its broadcast operations. From a production standpoint, the time and cost benefits have been impressive. Under the old analog system, it took one hour to produce one hour of content, not including the time spent searching for material. By comparison, it now takes producers using the digital media solution one hour to produce around 10 hours of content — accelerating the all-important production cycle by a factor of 10. LiaoNing TV is also making history. In implementing the digital media solution, the station has become the first digital broadcaster in China, achieving the market-leading position it had always aimed for. Moreover, as an early adopter, LiaoNing TV is creating new programming content and, subsequently, feels sure it will grab precious market share in the emerging digital TV market. With the help of IBM and its Business Partner, LiaoNing TV has a customized, scalable solution that suits its needs today and going forward. “By choosing a digital media solution, our station is benefiting from easy centralized content management, reliability, continuous content availability and high-speed data transmissions—all at significantly lower costs than conventional analog systems,” says Mr. Zhao. “IBM has truly helped to transform our business.” For more information Please contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner. Or visit: ibm.com/ondemand or ibm.com/solutions/digitalmedia
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