Deployment : TV Viewing, Made Easier

In India, television programs are broadcast through two main ways: direct to
home (DTH) and digital cable with content distributed by multi-service operators
(MSOs). It is often the MSOs who are responsible for providing the content
signals to the service providers for the cable TV. Each city is likely to have
one to three MSOs.

Since de-regulation, viewers can choose from hundreds of channels offered by
domestic players and global media companies. This scenario is very different as
compared to early 1990s-when viewers only had a few channels provided by a
single government broadcaster.

One such leading MSO provides popular television content in Bhopal, Indore,
Mhow, Mandsaur, Jabalpur, Jaipur and Ajmer. Its network caters to over 1.2
million households, and it offers six channels transmitted 24 hours a day.

For this MSO, technology has also played a significant part to enable it to
offer this wide variety of channels. Besides fiber optic uplinks that deliver
the content and setup boxes that decode the data stream to make it ready for
viewing, there is also some behind-the-scenes technology.

To manage this digital content, the MSO needed a cable head-end solution, as
well as video editing software, content management solutions and a reliable
storage system, to make the delivery of these television programs possible.

The MSO turned to Total Solutions, which offers such 'behind the scenes'
technology to MSOs, video editing houses and cable/satellite operators. Total
Solutions serves customers in the Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh regions and
besides incorporating Matrox video editing software into its servers, the
company has also developed customized software for cable TV, which it integrates
with broadcasting systems.

The process

For the MSO, a key criteria was to deliver the television programs so that
viewers are able to enjoy the channels that they have subscribed to without
experiencing any delay, degradation or disruption.

As broadcast content is received, it is digitized and captured on the server.
The video editors will then pull out the video that goes to the player machines.
Then, ticker titles are added with the ticker software; the programs are put in
correct sequence with titles; and the promotions and advertisements added.

The jobs are then queued up and sent to the local cable operators. The MSO
has just a two-hour buffer to work on all the content prior to delivery. In this
tight production and delivery cycle, each server is dependent on the other, and
a delay in one will cause delays to the entire process.

“As the content received needs to be stored, modified and delivered to the
cable operators on a daily cycle, there is little opportunity to reverse any
errors,” explained Manish Kataria, Partner, Total Solutions.

The MSO decided on 50 servers from Total Solutions, each equipped with Intel
Xeon processors, 4GB of RAM, Nvidia graphics card, and four Seagate Barracuda
500GB drives on board. The servers also come with the software player machines,
movie player, cable magic, music channel, and ticker machines installed.

Seagate Barracuda ES drives were chosen to ensure that there is no disruption
to the workflow, as well as to allow fast editing speeds and high storage
capacity for the large audiovisual files. For the MSO, they also wanted to avoid
the situation of failed drives, as having to replace such drives is a very
tedious, disruptive and costly process. To ensure no data loss when the MSO
downloads data and uploads it in real-time, the benefits of the Seagate
Barracuda ES which include high capacity, high reliability, low power
consumption and tolerance to rotational vibration, making it ideal for such a
demanding business environment.

Benefits

Total Solutions has been using Seagate's Barracuda ES drives as the standard
hard disk drive (HDD) for its customers' systems for many years. “As the content
received needs to be stored, modified and delivered to the cable operators on a
daily cycle, there is little opportunity to reverse any errors, ” explained
Kataria. He claimed that he had previously experienced using drives that were
not designed to work in a 24x7 application, and a typical implementation of 125
drives in about 50 desktop workstations would turn up atleast two to three
failed drives in a week. However, things changed with the introduction of
Seagate's Barracuda ES drives. Since the implementation of the switch, not a
single drive has encountered any failure-a far cry from the two or three drive
failures a week that used to be the norm.

“Since the release of Seagate's Barracuda ES series, we have begun using
these SATA HDDs at capacities of 500GB and above in all our critical systems,
for optimized capacity, reliability and performance, without experiencing a
single failure,” said Kataria.

So far, the MSO has been very satisfied with the servers. The SATA 3Gbps
interface of the Barracuda ES drive allowed it to rapidly handle a substantial
workload, and the outstanding reliability has helped to ensure a high level of
productivity. With this strong storage foundation in place, it has helped the
MSO to make possible the magic of the small screen for its viewers.

Rachna Gupta

rachnagu@cybermedia.co.in