BBC TECHNOLOGY CHOOSE OMNEON SERVERS

OMNEON'S Networked Content Servers have been chosen by BBC Technology to serve as the infrastructure for their expanding Multi-Streaming Area (MSA) at BBC Television Centre in London.
This is the second Omneon sale to the BBC forming part of their expansion of on-air facilities.
The decision to incorporate the Networked Content Servers was comprehensively based on Omneon’s ability to provide a highly fault tolerant and fully scalable solution at a cost-effective price. In the present expansion phase, the MSA system will scale from a six-stream system with 20 hours of MPEG2 storage (as used for the Wimbledon & Open Golf Interactive services) to a dual-server system with 80 hours of storage and 22 channels to deliver an additional complex BBC programme. This allows ample headroom for future development of new services.
Alan Hoggarth, Vice President of Operations for Omneon in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said: “The redundancy and scalability of the Omneon Networked Content Server is key for this project, and the BBC’s configuration takes full advantage of these attributes. With the prospect of additional digital services being made available in the future, it was crucial that any solution implemented now could be scaled to meet that demand. An extremely high level of fault tolerance was also a primary consideration for BBC Technology. The architecture of the Omneon Networked Content Server allows redundancy to be configured into the system according to the particular needs of the broadcaster.”
In order to achieve their goal for enhanced multi-channel services, the BBC required a dependable plan for redundancy eliminating any single point of failure in the system.
The output from the MSA is managed by OmniBus' multi-channel control and automation system, Colossus.
The overall project is being managed by ATG Spectrum, one of the UK's leading independent system integrators. (CD)