Overview

Modern broadcast group owners and operators continue pondering the question "Where and how do we position ourselves for the future?" Entire enterprises, whether broadcast or content distribution facilities, are keenly aware of the concepts of network-like operations.

Achieving the goal of a homogeneous merger of digital technology with human operations involves long-term capital cost reductions and improvements in operational efficiency. To reach the technology goal, we must lean more toward interoperability than we have already.

Interoperability continues to remain a prime target of achievement across all systems. Accomplishing universal interoperability necessitates segmenting certain functional elements in a system and providing connectivity and hooks that will allow other elements to easily be attached or removed without substantial operational consequences.

The following topics will focus on the storage side of the interoperability equation. In the media server domain, the two major components remain the input/output processing (codecs and channels) and the storage of the data (drives, arrays, libraries.) What we've lacked in the previous several years of media server development is a means to conveniently add storage in the same manner that the computer-centric world has been able. Now, with the newest concepts of network-based storage becoming available in the computer and data world, the media server-centric world is poised and ready to migrate in that direction.

Targets set by broadcasters and content distributors for wide area connectivity (including storage) require extensions to media server concepts that are not yet universal even in the local area. Some feel that before a...