Case Study: NRK. NRK invests in Programme Bank with TSL

Case Study: NRK NRK invests in Programme Bank with TSL

NRK Programme Bank represents probably the most complex file-based solution in Europe to date, if not the world Norwegian state broadcaster NRK has rolled out a uniquely powerful, all-encompassing asset management system as part of its crossmedia developments. Implemented by systems integrator TSL, with considerable software input from Omnibus, Programme Bank was created to satisfy one of the most demanding set of operational and technical requirements coming from a major European broadcaster. There is no separation of radio or television anymore in NRK, Arild Hellgren, director of technology for NRK stated. Productions in television, radio and the internet all work together, and content goes across all three platforms. The whole of NRK is moving to one production body. This is the real driver behind Programme Bank, the new content system developed for and by NRK. With everyone in the organisation potentially interested in every piece of content, it was clear that a new way of sharing material was required. Add to the mix the requirement to serve not just the Oslo headquarters but also 13 regional centres around Norway, and the requirements are already becoming demanding. I started looking at this at the beginning of 2005, Hellgren recalled. At that time a lot of people were talking about file-based production. Indeed, we had our own file-based island, our Quantel newsroom. Now we wanted all our content available to all. I set up a task force to devise a case for file-based content sharing. I told them I wanted it on one sheet of A4 paper I could take to the managing director, he continued. The final version of the business case actually ran to two pages, but with it he was able to persuade NRK s board to release 20 million euros for the one-off investment. Armed with the requirements and the budget he went out to the market. To remain within EU tendering laws the requirements were carefully stated in terms of outcomes, with payment tied to delivery of proven functionality and timescales. In this way, NRK used the market and in particular the knowledge and experience of the systems integrators to prove that the NRK concept was right, and that it was now technically possible. The successful systems integrator was UK-based TSL. The response from the market was that this was the first big project that established a completely new way of working, within an existing operation that had to continue on air at all times, Hellgren explained. TSL gave us the confidence they could do that, and offered a value for money contract. NRK was already familiar with Omnibus, as its Columbus automation is used in the regional centres. Omnibus demonstrated that its Opus platform was capable of development to deliver the required functionality and connectivity about 50 per cent of the contract value is in new software development. The third main partner in the project is NRK itself. As well as being the customer it is also responsible for delivering the network infrastructure and all the standard IT-equipment. In this sense and unusually, NRK is both the customer and a sub-contractor of TSL....productions in television, radio and the internet all work together, and content goes across all three platforms. The whole of NRK is moving to one production body...

Pressure Contracts were signed and the project begun, with the intention of the first handovers being made in mid 2008 and final sign-off by the end of the year. But the political masters of NRK intervened to add pressure. Norway was a late-comer to digital terrestrial television, starting broadcasts as recently as 1 September 2007. NRK was asked to help drive digital uptake by launching a new channel NRK Super, aimed at children as part of the new multiplex. There was no point in setting up a workflow for the new channel only for it to be completely changed within a few months, so the Programme Bank timescales were pulled back to allow NRK Super to go on air from a completely filebased environment on 1 December last year. It is not the first time that Arild Hellgren has given his suppliers this sort of headache. I was in charge of the coverage of the Lillehammer Olympics in 1994, which were the first all-digital Olympics, he recalled. I pushed Sony to deliver Digital Betacam half a year early to meet our schedule. With the first phase of implementation live and proven, it was a good time to visit to see what this system achieves. At the heart of Programme Bank is a central media store, which uses Omneon MediaGrid disk storage with archiving on a StorageTek tape robot using Diva software. The StorageTek unit is built to be expanded, so in its present location it can grow to 360,000 hours of content. The Omneon MediaGrid One of the biggest installed in Europe - currently has 89 servers, with a total of 5000 hours capacity at Programme Bank s internal standard of 50Mb/s IMX in a Quicktime wrapper. The third resident system in the central server room is an IPV browse system, running Windows Media 9 at 1.5Mb/s. The server room, incidentally, was built for the project with fully redundant power supplies and cooling systems each rated at 100kW. Attached to this central archive of material are a number of domains. Some of these are geographic NRK s regional centres but in Oslo there are also application domains. System functionality The Oslo production domain is a good way of explaining the functionality of the system. This sub-system is responsible for ingest and delivery of content through local Omneon Spectrum servers. As well as conventional ingest from tapes or feeds, that also means live iso recording from the production studios at NRK, a task until now performed by Grass Valley Profile servers. Omnibus extended its functionality, in conjunction with Omneon s gang record facility, to allow this multiple parallel recording. Linked to each Spectrum are a number of IPV browse encoders, which start automatically creating the WM9 version within 10 seconds of the start of ingest. Should this fail for any reason, when the content gets to the MediaGrid a watch engine checks for the browse copy and if it cannot find it starts a transcode process immediately. This is the fundamental purpose of Programme Bank: every piece of content that is created or ingested into NRK is available on it, in high resolution format in the central server or its nearline tape archive, with a complete mirror of the whole archive in browse resolution. There are a number of specialist clients in key areas, particularly of course for ingest, editing and management. But what makes it genuinely open to all is that every single computer on the NRK network can access at least the browse version, and all the associated metadata, using nothing more than a web browser and a small client key from Omnibus. So every one of the station s 2500 staff can research content, view it, and at least top and tail material for subsequent editing. Legacy systems While Programme Bank has seen a major investment in new systems based around Omnibus and Omneon, NRK has a number of legacy systems that need to be integrated. Most obviously, the Quantel-based news system will remain independent to avoid any impact on newsroom performance. Content availability However, to meet the fundamental principle that all content should be available to all, TSL has provided links to and from the news system, with transwrapping in each direction, and complete metadata transparency. In the case of a major event, an incoming feed can be simultaneously recorded to Programme Bank and Quantel. Similarly, the regional centres have Profilebased storage. Again, these are integrated into the Programme Bank thanks to Telestream FlipFactory transcoding and transwrapping engines, which are automated by the Omnibus software. As the regional centres become life expired they will be replaced by local MediaGrid-based systems, reducing the need for format flipping. Importantly, Programme Bank is a content management system and is not directly involved with playout. This is handled by Abit automation in Oslo and Omnibus Columbus for regional playout. As all the transmission content is drawn from Programme Bank, naturally there are close links to ensure the right material is in the right place when needed. NRK is migrating towards Apple Final Cut Pro as its standard editing platform, chiefly because of its ready compatibility with the Quicktime-based Programme Bank. Final Cut Pro seats can access content on the MediaGrid when necessary. Production staff also have access to Omnibus s Headline desktop editor. Complete and transparent metadata transfer means that rough cuts can be made using Headline then transferred to a specialist in a Final Cut Pro suite for finishing. A slightly greater challenge but one which needed to be met for the project was to extend this metadata transparency to the Quantel system in news. Edits can be shared and modified freely between Quantel s desktop and craft editors, Final Cut Pro and Headline. The integration with Final Cut Pro and Quantel also populate the Programme Bank database with clip genealogy information.

Domain integration Also vital to the philosophy of the project was the ability to integrate all the stores in every domain. Whether using a specialist client or the web browser, users can configure the user interface to suit their needs. In particular, they can choose to search through content in a particular domain or in all domains. A user in Stavanger can search through the material in Tromsø, for example, in exactly the same way as through local material, with the browse resolution clip playing on screen virtually instantaneously. If the selected content is needed somewhere else it is automatically transferred to the local server in the target domain, if necessary passing through a Telestream FlipFactory engine on the way. Network NRK wanted to make the most efficient use of its available bandwidth, particularly between Oslo and its regional sites, some of which are very remote. So the decision was made not to establish a separate production network which might be under-utilised much of the time, but to establish a high capacity network infrastructure and lay onto it a number of virtual LANs to provide the connectivity required. Having taken that decision, it then followed that the network was potentially at risk from malware. A design requirement of all software, therefore, was that it had to be either compatible with standard anti-virus software or it could be demonstrated that it offered adequate protection. The core network as implemented by NRK offers at least 10Gb/s between sites, with 1Gb/s to any Programme Bank client. During testing engineers demonstrated 180 parallel streams of 50Mb/s IMX around the Oslo network without any performance degradation. There is a requirement for such high numbers of simultaneous transfers because the system moves content automatically in response to a number of drivers. Workflows can be set up as templates within Programme Bank: for example, the receipt of a completed programme from ingest or editing might then push it to quality control then to subtitling. Multimedia - was one of the key drivers of the system, and this too is fully integrated. Web producers will be able to use exactly the same tools as television producers, simply putting the finished packages into drop boxes for Windows Media encoding at 200kb/s, 400kb/s and 1Mb/s. It means that there is no longer a need for specialists in broadcast and web formats, very much meeting Arild Hellgren s vision of one NRK. Radio - has its own production system but has free access to all the content in Programme Bank at either high or browse resolution. Users will be able to strip the audio out of a Final Cut Pro file if necessary. Again this is changing the way that NRK works. The 24 hour news channel, for example, uses a very large amount of actuality sound originally sourced by television journalists and crews as much as 80 per cent overnight. In turn, this has led to radio producers working with television reporters to tune the way they work, adding more explanation and longer soundbites. The general feeling is that this has improved the television coverage as well as the radio news channel. Continuing developments It is the all-embracing nature of Programme Bank that makes it such an exciting project, because it introduces so many layers of complexity as you are drawn into it. The metadata scheme, for example, introduces as many as 70 or 80 different pieces of information to help researchers track down exactly the right footage. Metadata can be tied to the timeline: a new Omnibus interface speeds the way sports are logged for example, with one button clicks for events such as goals or free kicks. The metadata is automatically transferred to Final Cut Pro so the highlights are already clipped up before the editor even sits down. With NRK Super already on air, the system is rapidly being rolled out across the rest of the operation. How is it being received by its users? Normally on a project like this, people are reluctant to be first, reported Arild Hellgren. Producers told me they liked the idea of seeing everyone else s material but wanted to keep their own rushes for themselves. Now people are fighting to get into the Programme Bank, no-one wants to be the last working the old-fashioned way. With the end of this phase of the project in sight it is clear that there are more developments in planning. Inevitably the subject of high definition television was raised, and here NRK has an almost unique opportunity. Because we only started DTT last year, we specified MPEG-4 from the start. Our set-top boxes have both HDMI and Scart sockets, and a built-in down-converter to the Scart. So we do not need to launch an HD channel: we can just broadcast HD on any channel when we want to. TSL and Omnibus, with their technology partners, have successfully met the vision of NRK with a seamlessly integrated, file-based production and content environment. Most important, it is being rolled out without noticeable fear of new technology amongst its users, but a genuine enthusiasm for the creative possibilities. Programme Bank is a good name for what we have achieved, concluded Hellgren. Our producers see that they are investing content into the Programme Bank, withdrawing what they need when they need it. Based on an article first published in Broadcast Engineering World Edition For further information about TSL please visit: www.tsl.co.uk

There is no separation of radio or television anymore in NRK. Productions in television, radio and the internet all work together, and content goes across all three platforms. The whole of NRK is moving to one production body. Arild Hellgren Director of Technology NRK For further information about TSL please visit: www.tsl.co.uk

TSL is the UK s leading independent broadcast systems integrator, with an international client base. The company has a strong professional products division that includes Audio Monitoring, Mains Distribution, UMD and Tally Systems. TSL also develops custom products in-house to meet customer requirements that cannot be satisfied by standard products. For further information please visit www.tsl.co.uk TSL Sales: +44 (0)1628 676 221 E-mail: sales@tsl.co.uk Web: www.tsl.co.uk TSL, Vanwall Business Park, Vanwall Road, Maidenhead, Berkshire SL6 4UB, United Kingdom Tel: +44 (0)1628 676 200 Fax: +44 (0)1628 676 299 E-mail: sales@tsl.co.uk 2008 TSL Systems. All rights reserved.