TVN 24:
Xsan Drives 24-Hour News Station
Delivering breaking news and first-rate analysis to an information-hungry audience, 24-hours a day, seven days a week, is a huge endeavour. The sheer volume of material — both live and recorded — plus the ongoing imperative to present it in new and interesting ways, is staggering.
Technology is key to the undertaking; it can make or break a 24-hour news channel. The right technology, deployed effectively, can facilitate success by delivering performance and reliability at the right price. This is what Apple has done for TVN 24, Poland’s first and only 24-hour news channel, and by far the country’s best performing pay-channel.
TVN 24 (a spin-off of Poland’s leading commercial free-to-air channel, TVN, and part of ITI, one of the country’s largest media and entertainment groups), has invested in a massive, fully integrated Apple storage and networking set-up. With 55 Xsans, 30 Xserve G5s, 22 Xserve RAIDs, 50 Final Cut Pro licences, 50 Power Mac G5s, 10 PowerBook G4s and two licences for Apple’s Shake digital effects package, TVN 24 is home to Europe’s largest Mac-based broadcast installation.
But when TVN 24 first launched in August 2001, it was based on entirely different technology, built on a far less open and flexible principle.
Maciej Sojka, general manager of TVN 24, explains: “I was a producer in the news department at TVN where everything was digital but was still VTR- and tape-based. I knew this model wouldn’t work for 24-hour news — if you need to re-edit the same footage throughout the day, it’s simply not efficient to use VTRs”.
An extensive, server-based file editing system was the way forward, but who could supply it? Although Sojka had a high opinion of Final Cut Pro as an editing tool, his producers and editors needed to be able to move large files around the network quickly and reliably. TVN 24 turned to Avid because, at the time, it was the only company able to supply both file format editing and an integrated server for media sharing. But Sojka admits the solution was “always going to be temporary”. He adds: “With a proprietary system like Avid, you never feel as if you own your own content”. By way of comparison, he says of Apple’s QuickTime format: “It’s a standard file format that can be accessed from absolutely any platform — at no extra cost”.
Fast and reliable technology is crucial to any TV news channel. Poland’s TVN 24 is based on an advanced Apple solution that keeps the newsroom running smoothly and efficiently — all day, every day.
When the opportunity arose to create a purpose-built studio for the news channel, Sojka opted to, in his words “correct the mistakes we’d originally made”.
“From a cost point of view, upgrading is not a problem. In my opinion, products like the Xserve RAID have the best price/performance ratio on the market.”
The timing couldn’t have been better. Apple had alerted Sojka to the imminent launch of Xsan, an enterprise-class SAN solution that gives multiple computers high-speed, simultaneous access to huge amounts of RAID storage. The way was now open for Sojka’s dream set-up — a coupling of Apple’s storage and networking know-how with it’s world-class video editing software. As a litmus test, TVN installed a Beta version of Xsan, and within a few months — with the help of Apple and its local partners — the workflow was stable and reliable enough for Sojka to invest in a further 50 copies of Xsan. The channel’s ongoing success was assured.
