Wrapper do I use?

---

NHL Historical Archive What Codec/Wrapper do I use? Key considerations: •Interoperability •Supportability •Quality •Longevity. Do I need an intermediate? AVC-Intra100, Quicktime. Broad NLE support, easily re-wrapped, full-raster, i-frame, future enhancements in same codec family. NHL valued the image quality, support for existing FCP and Grass Valley infrastructure, and compatibility with P2 acquisition workflows. We chose to forgo an intermediate format because timeliness requirements and heavily partial-filerestore centric workflows made the time/bandwidth savings of an additional format unnecessary.

NHL Historical Archive Where do my assets come from? Key considerations: •Heterogeneity of asset codec/wrapper •Timeliness •Lifecycle

Arena Grass Valley Servers, P2 Cameras. We enjoy the benefits of a fairly homogenous variety of source formats as 90% of our content is coming in as either native AVCi-100 or as legacy DVCPRO HD drastically reducing dependence on transcoding for full-res workflows. Our expectations that future AVCi enhancements should allow us to ensure a long archive lifecycle from a codec standpoint is an important side-benefit.

NHL Historical Archive How fast does my repository grow? Key Considerations: •Robot slot density •Externalization •Backup/off-site storage •Retrieval patterns •Asset usage patterns

With 1300+ games yearly and an explosion in remotely produced/acquired content - fast! Currently nearly 3PB/yr. This volume when housed in a data-center in Midtown Manhattan requires some carefully crafted choices when sizing or expanding tape robotics to meet this demand. Lack of physical space for slot expansion and usage/retrieval patterns drove our decision to externalize whole game encodes at season’s end. Melts and proxy footage are kept in the robot forever. Externalized assets are stored on shelves in our local physical library and copy 2s of all assets are shipped offsite.

NHL Historical Archive Where does my metadata come from? What does it look like? Key Considerations:

•Sources: •Telemetry •Statistics •Acquisition/Transmission •Logging •Portability. •Silo'd logging The NHL’s HITS system records and provides rich statistical metadata. We depend largely on statistical metadata for cataloging and identifying assets. We don’t do any enhanced production logging but are able to leverage clip selection in multiple silo’d applications to provide additional searchability for separate groups within the enterprise.

NHL Historical Archive How do I store assets? Key Considerations: •Storage Fabric •Disk performance metrics •Management •Expandability •Asset lifecycle

Multiple StorNext fiber-attached SAN volumes, managed by Dalet, with archival by Front Porch. Currently we have multiple vendors for SAN disk volumes and in future look to unify that part of the infrastructure to improve manageability at the array level. Each SAN volume serves a specific purpose - Acquisition/Transcode/Distribution, Editorial/Production, Project aging/archival. This is done to spread performance requirements optimally, provide relief valves during peak usage in one area or another, and to allow for more incremental expansion expense.

NHL Historical Archive What edit/graphics systems are in use? Key Considerations: •Workflow requirements •Format support •SAN storage optimization •Project archival/restoration

Final Cut Pro, After Effects. This informs many of the aforementioned choices as you will need to choose a shared filesystem, MAM, codec(s), and wrapper formats suited to your existing edit environments and workflows. The importance of speed and the ease of importing and exporting assets to/from your editorial/production systems can not be overstated. The complexity of the interactions between the different elements of an asset management system should remain largely hidden from end-users and the software they use to access and use those assets should enhance and not detract from that goal.

NHL Historical Archive Who and how many users need access? Key Considerations: •Remote access authorization & authentication •Proxy streaming (devices) •Expansion plans

Currently only internal users in our Active Directory forest have access. Any system you implement should be able to integrate with multiple user account stores, support remote webbased access (even if it is only used internally), and be able to scale to support hundreds of end-users in the near term and potentially scale to provide thousands (millions??). API-based access and Responsive designed UIs should be seen as major pluses. There remains many things to consider in this area: Fan access, web CMS search & retrieval, mobile device support, etc.

NHL Historical Archive How is file-based content Transported?

Key Considerations:

•WAN acceleration •Secure upload and download •FTP

Signiant agent-based and Media Exchange transport with some FTP distribution. We have endeavored to reduce/eliminate FTP with some success which is important because of the expense, manageability, and security problems associated with it but it remains stubbornly difficult to eliminate it entirely. All source asset ingest is currently powered by Signiant which allows us to make all game-based assets available for edit by 6AM the following morning - this would not be possible with a less efficient transfer protocol like FTP. Media Exchange enables us to send and receive filebased assets on an ad-hoc basis to RSN partners and to/from NHL field acquisition teams.

NHL Historical Archive How do we share content, with whom , and in which format(s)? Key Considerations:

•Transcode volume •Output formats •Streaming •Rights management •Bandwidth requirements •Scale •Aging policy Most transcodes are of content with durations of less than 10 minutes. Obviously this whole presentation could be spent on this topic alone and there would still remain much to discuss. Our partnership with Neulion who deftly handles all of our new-media (read web) asset distribution, means that we do not have to deal with the complexity of the myriad associated delivery bitrates and formats. We provide CableLabs compatible MPEG2 content to cable syndication partners and BRoll,Scenic, and Melt content to our broadcast partners via Aspera, Signiant, and Signiant Media Exchange. We provide this content in its native format and in MXF-wrapped EVS-ready XDCAM 422 format. Sharing Bandwidth management remains a challenge as does expansion.

NHL Historical Archive Workflows Ad-Hoc Content (scripts on ny-xsanxfer01 run out of /export/home/••••/svn/video/ny-xsanxfer01 and log to /export/home/••••/logs)

Neulion

Neulion Signiant Agent

ny-xsanxfer01 XSAN2 [DaletInbound/ AdHocRecords]

Front Porch

ny-xsanxfer01 [signiantAdhocMover.pl]

XSAN2 [Vodflow/ MAMProxy]

RadiantGrid

Episode

XSAN2 [Episode/ MeltProxy]

XSAN2 [Vodflow/Outgoing/ MAMProxy]

DALET

Asset type description

Archive vía Front Porch

Source material origination

NHL authored script

Signiant transfers

Transcode/rewrap

LAN File transfers

Asset w/proxy available in Dalet

ny- xsanxfer01 [meltRewrapToRadiant.pl]

NHL Historical Archive Workflows Melt rewrap and transcode (scripts on ny-xsanxfer01 run out of/export/ home/••••/svn/video/ny-xsanxfer01 and log to/ export/home/••••/logs)

ny-xsancifs01 XSAN2 [Episode/MeltProxy]

XSAN2 [Vodflow/Outgoing/ MAMProxy]

Arena (ie: avtnyr.nhl.com)

Episode

DALET

Asset type description

Archive vía Front Porch

Source material origination

NHL authored script

Signiant transfers

Transcode/rewrap

LAN File transfers

ny- xsanxfer01 [meltRewrapToRadiant.pl]

Asset w/proxy available in Dalet

NHL Signiant NY-AVT[1..6]

XSAN2 [Vodflow/ MAMProxy]

Front Porch

RadiantGrid

NHL Historical Archive Workflows Neulion Proxy retranscode (scripts on ny-xsanxfer01 run out of/export/ home/••••/svn/video/ny-xsanxfer01 and log to/ export/home/••••/logs)

ny-xsanxfer01 [neulionProxyMoveToRadiant.pl]

Neulion

XSAN2[Vodflow/ MAMProxy]

DALET

Asset type description

Archive vía Front Porch

Source material origination

NHL authored script

Signiant transfers

Transcode/rewrap

LAN File transfers

Neulion Signiant Agent

Asset w/proxy available in Dalet

RadiantGrid

ny-xsanxfer01 XSAN2 [/SigniantTransfers/ fromNeulion/archive/ proxy]

XSAN2 [Vodflow/Outgoing/ MAMProxy]

NHL Historical Archive Workflows VOD Highlights (scripts on ny-xsanxfer01 run out of /export/ home/••••/svn/video/ny-xsanxfer01 and log to / export/home/••••/logs)

ny-xsanxfer01 XSAN2 [DaletInbound/ VODHighlights]

Neulion Signiant Agent

Neulion

Front Porch

ny-xsanxfer01 [signiantVODMover.pl]

XSAN2 [Vodflow/ neulionHighlights/]

ny-xsanxfer01 [AVCi_highlightSubmitter.pl]

XSAN2 [Vodflow/Outgoing/VOD_Highlights] & XSAN2 [Vodflow/Outgoing/MAMProxy]

XSAN2 [Episode/ neulionVOD]

Episode

ny-xsanxfer01 [VODClipMover.pl]

XSAN2 [Vodflow/ Incoming]

ny-xsanxfer01 [meltRewrapToRadiant.pl]

RadiantGrid

Aspera Sync to Comcast, Versus, Perform, …

Asset type description

Archive vía Front Porch

Source material origination

NHL authored script

Signiant transfers

Transcode/rewrap

DALET

LAN File transfers

Asset w/proxy available in Dalet

NHL Historical Archive Sources

Processing

Destinations

Front Porch Diva Actors

Remotely produced piece

RadiantGrid Transcode cluster

Data LUN 1 - RAID 5 (C1)

Data LUN 2 - RAID 5 (C2)

Data LUN 3 - RAID 5 (C1)

Data LUN 4 - RAID 5 (C2)

Episode transcode cluster - long form and userinitiated Full-res files

Arena Grass Valley Encoders

Partial File Restores

Partial File Restores

Raw footage from Dalet

Dalet Proxy Storage

Transcoded Proxy

Final Cut Projects

Arena Signiant Servers Full-res Whole Games and Melts

Melts and Ad-Hoc XDCAM & DVCProHD for footage licensees

Statistical Metadata

Search and Retrieval

Downlinks and Ad-Hoc content B-Rolls, Best-Ofs, produced content for RSNs

NHL MPLS Network

Footage download

Live International Satellite and Fiber distribution

ENG/Shoot footage

NY HQ Control Room Game Feeds and Team Cam

NHL Live

Live game feeds

Clean feeds, team cam interviews, NHL Live, Event coverage Stats Data

Live streaming

Full-res syndication

Neulion Signiant Servers Streaming Highlights

NHL Historical Archive

The End Thank You!