SiTV Builds Private Cloud for Media Assets, Improves Business Efficiencies With Hitachi Content Platform

Overview

Challenge

• SiTV wanted to transform its media asset management system to create a tapeless environment and improve business efficiency.

Solution

• Build a cloud platform for media archives, by replacing the physical tape library with Hitachi Content Platform, to accelerate the media recall process and eliminate risk of lost media.

Outcome

• Improved performance and accessibility led to greater business and staff efficiencies and reduced costs of operation.
• Video recall time reduced from hours to minutes.
• Decreased cost of operation by 50%.
• Seamless connection to future public media industry cloud.

Challenge

Transform Into the Market Leader

Shanghai Interactive Television Co., Ltd. (SiTV), established under the Shanghai Media Group (SMG) was founded in 2001. SiTV services include digital TV, video on demand (VOD) and interactive TV (ITV) business.

SiTV is currently one of China’s largest wired digital pay channel operation platforms and has the most digital TV channel operators. It is also the largest multimedia content supplier and service provider.

SiTV was using several types of physical tape libraries to store media assets for many years. However, physical tape library recall of media assets is slow, and it affected response times for business users. Plus, the tape drives and large quantities of offline tape in the media asset system need more personnel and time to operate and manage.

Meanwhile, accessing tape data was becoming a concern. The current tape format that the media assets used was being replaced, and administrators were faced with the challenges of tape renovation.

SiTV aims to build a first-class digital media integration, distribution and service platform and is committed to its vision to be the leading digital content integrator and industry operator in China. To achieve this vision, media assets (such as original copies of news, movies and so forth) need to be accessed, shared and distributed in multichannel exchanges more quickly. SiTV looked to not only to replace its tape environment, but also to fully transform to cloud.

Solution

Build a Private Cloud

Through ongoing discussions with Hitachi Vantara Global Services Solutions (GSS) team, SiTV was able to develop its plan to transform to a private cloud, and later a public cloud. To build the private cloud, the company chose Hitachi Content Platform for an object storage solution.

Through this platform, the SiTV team can access internal network media asset data directly, without resorting to manual queues and tape restores. This access is important as the team needs to be able to easily find the original files to allow repeat presentation of programs over multiple channels and online.

HCP object storage is a software-defined storage pool, a self-servicing operation. Maintenance can support data access applications as well as subsequent space allocation and expansion to reduce manual efforts

Hitachi Content Platform also helps SiTV to reduce risk during data migration and lessen the need for data backup. Object storage provides erasure coding, multicopy reserving and “write once, read many” (WORM), as well as versioning management, self-checking and self-healing. In this way, it eliminates the risk of data loss when physical and logical errors happened, and ensures that SiTV retains media asset data in the long term.

When HCP object storage replaced the tape library, the data was migrated without downtime. SiTV could be certain the media assets and data were unchanged as HCP allowed them, with fingerprint comparison, to compare the data before and after migration.

Outcome

SiTV Achieves Its Vision

With the private cloud on HCP in place, SiTV has improved business efficiencies by accelerating the speed of video review and reducing the queue time. In this way, it reduced video recall time from hours to minutes.

With greater speed that is now possible through HCP, SiTV transformed work operations. It moved away from the many manual operations to a self-service system. This change reduced the cost of operation by 50% and reduced the video recall time from hours to minutes. In addition, SiTV optimized the exchange process of media assets, from tape restore to direct online call-back, increasing the efficiency of media asset exchange and migration.

Now cloud-ready, SiTV can smoothly and seamlessly connect to the public media industry cloud in the future. With the HCP solution in place, SiTV is well on the way to achieving its vision and becoming the leading digital content integrator and industry operator in China.