Overview

What impact will storage have on your enterprise over the next few years? Think about what your storage needs might be today and then look out at the DTV mile posts of May 2002 for commercial station DTV cutover, and then at 2006 for the hand back of NTSC.

Consider how your enterprise might be interconnected and/or intra-connected. Imagine how important and how complex data management will become as the effective integration of video media, as data, takes a strong hold on the facility. How important will datacasting be and what relationship will it have to today's conventional broadcasting operations?

These are questions being discussed by today's information systems industry, by the IT (Information Technology) managers of facilities, and consequently will need to be addressed by the broadcast industry of tomorrow.

Broadcaster operations face the routine tasks of translating spot media to video file servers for the more immediate needs of airing commercials, interstitials, and in some instances, for program time shifting. These tasks are accomplished with relatively straightforward approaches, using a modular infrastructure of video servers, sometimes with backup servers and sometimes incorporating a near-line data tape archive system. There are principally around half a dozen manufacturer choices for broadcast quality compressed digital storage systems for commercial playback. One could easily add another handful that produce server architectures designed for cable delivery, pay-per-view, and other similar applications.

Each of these companies offers the minimum essentials of video server hardware, which include the basic, fundamental functionality for recording, cataloging...