BT Broadcast Services (BTBS) has completed successful trials of the Pharos Mediator media management system as a key element of the BT Mediahive digital content management platform.
BT Mediahive offers new channels to market for content and media owners, while making the process of content storage and distribution vastly more efficient. The ability to ingest content for regional or global distribution in a variety of media formats makes BT Mediahive a powerful tool for many business-to-business and consumer applications.
A Pharos Mediator handles BT Mediahive's ingest and media management for broadcast playout. Mediator is a database-driven media manager that can automatically access, supervise and move content while simultaneously managing the processing applied to the outgoing signals. Mediator's architecture enables any form of audio/video source to be handled, including graphic stills, short animated files, audio clips and feature-length television programmes.
At BT Mediahive, it controls data flow between a disk-based server and a three petabyte robotic data tape store capable of holding up to 700,000 hours of MPEG2 programme content in 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratio.
Nick Townsend, Head of BT Mediahive, said: "BT Tower is one of the largest switching centres in the world, with a minimum of 16,000 hours of video traffic passing through it each day. BT Mediahive adds ingest, archiving, reformatting and playout services to what was previously a live signal-switching operation. BT Mediahive became fully operational in mid-summer and we now manage seven live channels, all feeding the Sky satellite platform. We chose best-of-breed suppliers throughout the system and have been very pleased with the results. Pharos were recommended to us by one of our earliest clients and have proved both efficient and flexible, handling what at times must have seemed relatively bizarre requirements."
BT Broadcast Services is BT's media solutions business. It designs, develops and manages global broadcast, content management and communications systems for broadcasters, content owners and distributors, large corporations and government organisations around the world.
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