In Broadcast - May 2012 - 60

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 8 - MAY 2012

InMEDIA

In The Cloud With Front Porch Digital’s LYNXsm
By Phil Jackson, Chief Marketing Ofﬁcer, Front Porch Digital
Phil Jackson

At this year’s NAB show, Front Porch Digital announced the ﬁrst customer wins for what we believe will be a very important advance for the industry. In order to address new markets proﬁtably and maximise proﬁtability in existing markets, all broadcasters and content owners need access to high-quality content storage management (CSM) solutions. Without this, it is increasingly difﬁcult for any media company to get full value from the content it owns, and by missing the potential revenue locked up in that content, they can become progressively less competitive by being less responsive to the various delivery channels. At the same time, the conditions that create this pressure on content owners also make it vital for them to ﬁnd a way of implementing CSM in the most effective way. The ideal CSM system also needs to be agile enough to cope with the consequences of rapid organisational change, and sudden ﬂuctuations in demands for capacity. What’s needed is a powerful solution that is also very ﬂexible, with a substantial ondemand capability. Front Porch Digital’s LYNXsm is the answer. Effectively we have taken the world’s best CSM system – DIVArchive – and applied it to the cloud, making the most comprehensive CSM toolset available to any customer in a way that ﬁts almost any budget, with payment on a per-use basis. LYNX is effectively a service family name, each product and capability is released incrementally with its own unique feature set. The ﬁrst service

Lynx Solution

commercially available is LYNXdr, a fully featured disaster recovery system. This was followed by the NAB launch of LYNXlocal – a local appliance for network and cloud service caching of content, all delivered at a low monthly rate as part of the LYNX service. LYNX provides an integrated cloud-based environment for managing assets on a global scale, from any device and any location. Leveraging established secure cloud technology, the LYNX family of products uniquely supports a range of networked and distributed solutions, giving media organisations a nextgeneration approach to global asset management with an outstanding range of beneﬁts in adaptability, on-demand scalability, capital cost reduction, avoidance of technology obsolescence, and simpliﬁed maintenance. Tightly integrated with multiple,

geographically diverse hosted CSM solutions based on the company’s ﬂagship DIVArchive technology, LYNX services provide a route to sustained proﬁtability in ﬂuid and competitive operating conditions by offering rapid infrastructure deployment on demand, matching IT investment to revenue opportunities, and making it easier to bring new channels to market, for both play to air and online delivery. LYNX allows an organisation to augment or replace some of its dedicated in-house equipment with private, public or hybrid cloud services, with the ability to deliver to all formats from traditional broadcast to online. LYNX performs all the same tasks that an in-house system is capable of. This includes complex platform integration, metadata management, packaging, scheduling, transcoding, and delivery. Content owners who already use Front Porch Digital’s DIVASolutions can easily add cloud services to expand existing on-site capabilities in a cost-effective way. Customers gain inﬁnite scalability, enhanced resilience, and security, while lowering costs and retaining the trusted video lifecycle-management capabilities they rely on. The LYNX service will provide built-in content distribution as a standard feature, so distribution

is tightly controlled, and based on predeﬁned and automated policies. Content is delivered efficiently – internally or externally – while fulfilling format and transport method requirements. The ﬁrst of these solutions to be launched, LYNXdr provides a secure, cloud-based, disaster recovery and long-term asset storage service for any content owner, from broadcasters to institutions and governments. LYNXdr is the ﬁrst service of its kind in the industry. And of course once customers have ingested their content into LYNXdr it is present in the cloud and available for other operations if desired. For example, LYNX will be integrated to DIVApublish, Front Porch Digital’s cloud-based online video publishing (OVP) service. Customers can have their content ingested to LYNXdr as ﬁle-based media or from tape, with the option of managing the ingest and restore processes manually from supplied software, or automating the processes to make ingest and restore invisible and seamless background tasks. LYNXdr services include the necessary software to network existing DIVArchive implementations to the cloud and with the option of a hosted implementation of Front Porch Digital’s media asset management system DIVAdirector® V.5 to view system-wide content. LYNXdr provides inexpensive offsite replication of the content library with optional automated updating, and a dashboard view of the stored assets. Three restore options offer secure online on-demand restoration, ofﬂine duplicate tape restoration overnight, or ofﬂine duplication of an entire tape library in the event of a true disaster recovery re-build. LYNX is poised to help media organisations take advantage of the huge opportunities to connect with new users, adapt to new consumption habits, and build new revenue streams. Many organisations are sitting on decades’ worth of content that can be made available commercially, and with LYNX there is now an easy route to these revenue streams, without the need for a big upfront capital investment. ■

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