Spescom Media IT, the broadcast operation of JSE-listed Spescom, has just closed a deal worth R2 million with M-Net to provide Avid Unity ISIS equipment for the new Survivor South Africa reality-TV series.
"We have an established relationship with M-Net, having previously supplied the equipment for the Big Brother series," says Sean du Toit, director of Spescom Media IT.
"Both Big Brother and Survivor are produced by the production company Endemol SA, which has teamed with M-Net to create local versions of both series."
Johan Chandler, Head of Production Services of M-Net, says: "From an M-Net perspective the timing was perfect as we planned to upgrade our existing Unity facilities to ISIS. The time pressure started the process much earlier than anticipated."
Du Toit adds: "The challenge with reality-TV series is not just the short turnaround time between filming and broadcast - most actuality programmes face that issue - but the massive volume of content which must be made instantly available to many users in the production department.
"The Avid Unity range of products which we supply is custom-built to cope with high-volume content and multiple users. The Avid Unity ISIS (infinitely scalable intelligent storage) servers are similar to SAN (storage area network) products in mainstream IT but built on a much larger scale, due to the requirements for handling real-time video content."
Avid Unity ISIS systems run Gigabit Ethernet connections and have the latest blade-based server architecture. Providing content to multiple users for editing and finishing, the ISIS servers can handle the full range of digital video formats at network speeds of up to 145Mbps (Megabits per second).
ISIS servers are fully scalable from 8TB to 192TB (Terabyte) storage volumes and can service anything from 150 real-time users up to 1 500 user accounts. Management software provides a simple administrator interface and the hardware is designed with multiple redundancy and load balancing to make sure no data is lost and downtime is eliminated.
"The pressure on reality-TV production facilities is enormous," says Du Toit. "Spescom Media IT has shown previously, during the Big Brother series, that the Avid technology we supply is equal to the task in all areas. The new Avid Unity ISIS servers are ideal for the high-volume content which Survivor South Africa will have to process.
"On our side, the pressure has been to put this SAN solution in place as quickly as possible. We have been able to do that within a week of the order being placed," concludes Du Toit.
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