Taking a second and more technical look

December 2011. Infront Group soccer archiving system in Milan. Not long ago we announced the availability of the latest five Italian soccer seasons images through the recent Media Asset management and delivery of the Italian subsidiary of the world renowned Infront Group. Actually from the Milan headquarters and after an important agreement with the Italian Soccer League “Lega Calcio”, this “experienced international full service sports marketing company” decided to create this huge archiving system. It is an important gathering of all images, well organized and structured, concerning Italian football, a part from those already belonging to broadcasters like Mediaset, RAI, SKY who acquired the sports tv rights in the latest years.
This giant archive and retrieve system on A and B soccer championships was requested and created in cooperation between Infront Group and Prevideo-Mediadesign.
The latter being a company at the doors of Milan specialized in creating and assisting broadcast and post technical facilities, with a background of over 30 years..
After a long period of initial designing, the system was setup with a choice of Harris Hardware, implementing classic Nexio servers and Invenio software taking care of all Media Asset Management functions, plus Isilon for storage.
The main idea was to create a gigantic system in order to offer broadcasters around the world the widest possible choice of Italian soccer seasons. So the complexity of the plant required great professionalism, almost endless scalability, the possibility to add drives without interrupting the service, or reformatting or else, and an incredible ability to integrate very different formats and feeds, typical of this multimedia world.
Furthermore it had to be practical, capable to integrate in a single system several services, like archiving, retrieving, and all created files should contain details, names, time-code info, nicknames for clips and protagonists, etc for any multiple and fast queries and successive re-distribution.
As far as distribution is concerned the system is also capable of live stream images even within the event itself taking place on field. The whole event can be streamed on the internet towards the subscribers who in their turn may -through a dedicate software- watch the complete match through the low res web-stream and mark some highlights of particular interest. These highlights may be up to around four-five minutes of footage and the subscriber practically forms an EDL. Then this list of editing decisions is sent back to the Infront system which creates a mid-res version of the requested video and audio sections and delivers them back to the subscriber.
The British company IPV had also an important role in this plant since they created the development of their particular softwares like “Curator” to be used to archive and retrieve materials and most of all to live stream all the media. Harris equipments acquire and load the clips in ingest keeping the native formats via live, satellite, fiber feeds and all files are then stored in two formats, one in SD as XDCAM and the other in HD as IMX. All materials -the live matches and the previous seasons cassettes - are ingested first in some dedicated online servers for a first trimming of unwanted parts and in a successive step moved to the big storage servers completely based on discs and avoiding tape storage completely in order to cancel any possible issue and room consuming physical shelves.