Advanced Broadcast Services invests in Sony PetaSite with Pharos automation

Advanced Broadcast Services, one of Britain's leading full-service providers of playout, transmission and broadcast resources, has chosen a Sony PetaSite data library as the basis of an expanded play-to-air facility.
Advanced Broadcast Services, which is located in West London, supports the needs of more than 20 television channels uplinking to the Sky Digital satellite platform. Ordered via Pharos Communications, the PetaSite being installed at Advanced Broadcast Services includes two SAIT-1 data-tape drives, an Ethernet hub, Fibrechannel connectivity and a terminal server.
The PetaSite occupies a standard 19-inch rack console and can accommodate 12 drives and 216 cartridges for up to 108 terabytes of native capacity. Seven cartridge and/or drive consoles can be added to the base system. The cartridge consoles allow users to add up to 330 cartridges for 165 terabytes of extra native capacity. Sustained native data transfer rates for the SAIT PetaSite library will reach up to 2.88 gigabyte/s and a standard file can be restored in just over one minute.
Advanced Broadcast Services' existing Pharos Playtime media management system is being expanded from six channels to 12. Playtime will control ingest from a Sony Flexicart to a Pinnacle video server, play-to-air from the server and delivery of programmes and interstitials to and from the PetaSite archive.
Advanced Broadcast Services' Managing Director, Sass Jahani, said: "The combination of Sony Flexicart, Sony PetaSite and Pharos Playtime was chosen for its proven reliability, logical operator interface and easy expandability. We have also been greatly impressed by the high standard of post-sales engineering support provided by Sony and Pharos during the five years that we have worked with them. PetaSite itself is expandable to a massive 1.2 petabytes which is comfortably beyond our current business plan."
The new system is being installed during May with an intended on-air date of June 1. The SAIT technology used in Sony's PetaSite employs a half-inch, single-reel cartridge providing more than double the uncompressed capacity of the nearest linear half-inch tape drive. SAIT-1 drives provide up to 1.3 terabytes of compressed capacity (500 gigabytes uncompressed) and a transfer rate of up to 78 megabyte/s compressed (30 megabyte/s uncompressed). SAIT-4 technology is expected to feature up to 4 terabytes of native capacity in a single cartridge (10.4 terabytes compressed).
Traditional broadcast control systems rely on a playlist of video events as their main timing reference. Pharos Playtime uses a package with independent tracks for each event sequence. Each track is displayed on the Playtime control screen as a separate timeline, typically representing main video, backup video, discrete voice-over languages, GPIs, mix/effects, logo and subtitles. Playtime enables individual schedulers to create dynamic and exciting presentation effects that could otherwise only be achieved using extensive postproduction facilities.
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