Front Porch Digital’s DIVArchive Makes Woodbine’s Enormous Racing Archive Accessible

September 24, 2007

Source: Front Porch Digital

Woodbine Entertainment, Canada’s top racetrack and also its leading archive of horseracing film and video, has
deployed Front Porch Digital’s DIVArchive to manage tens of thousands of hours of content and to facilitate fast browsing and retrieval of specified clips.

Woodbine’s television operation employs 110 people who produce 11,500 hours of live television every year, most of it for local races, but also thoroughbred and standardbred races from around the world. Since 2006,
relevant current content has been loaded into the DIVArchive system. Currently in the works is a long-term plan to make historic material accessible as well, eliminating the expense of tape and tape maintenance in
addition to the complications and delays posed by tape machines.

Unlike many broadcasters, Woodbine archives a high percentage of what it produces because it remains of interest to constituents of the racing industry indefinitely. As Doug Flaherty, Woodbine Entertainment’s director
of television explains it, “A horse may only race for a short time, but horses have offspring, so the bloodlines last forever.” For that reason, Woodbine has a unique, vast, and irreplaceable trove of footage, some of it
dating back to 1924. This footage is used by a varied and demanding clientele -- not only news, sports, and documentary producers, but also handicappers, trainers, and owners.

Front Porch Digital’s DIVArchive system is ideal for this environment because it makes it easy for a new user with no specialized technical knowledge to browse, identify, and retrieve clips from a familiar desktop interface. It also makes it easy to link complex and varied metadata to the content. A thoroughbred breeder looking to generate a future contender with particular attributes may, for example, wish to browse clips of every mare that has won a turf race by more than two lengths on a rainy day. DIVArchive makes this possible.

“We did extensive research to find the most user-friendly system available, and that’s DIVArchive,” said Flaherty. “This was crucial to us. The interface is very straightforward, making it easy to search for something,
find it, view it, mark it, and restore it to location. I could show anyone how to do it in 10 minutes.”

Woodbine Entertainment’s DIVArchive is interfaced with four M-Series iVDRs, three of them located at the Woodbine production facility in Toronto, and one at the Mohawk racing and production facility located 30 miles away. It is also networked to three Avid Adrenaline NLE suites and two Grass Valley PVS-1108 Profile XP video servers. The network link to the NLE suites means that a producer working on a documentary or similar project can identify and retrieve footage directly from the archive into Avid Adrenaline. Woodbine’s Storagetek SL-500 tape library contains 49 LTO3 tapes (400GB/tape) as well as a disk array of 13x136GB drives for a total of 1.6TB of RAID 5 storage.

About Woodbine Entertainment

Woodbine Entertainment employs more than 3,000 people and offers a range of racing, gaming, and entertainment products available worldwide over the company's various Internet sites. About 6 million customers visit the slot
machine facilities at Woodbine and Mohawk racetracks annually. More wager on the company's horse racing through live, off-track, and in -home services. In addition to the two racetrack brands, the corporation is the umbrella for Champions Off-Track Wagering, Horse Player Interactive, and The Racing Network Canada.

About Front Porch Digital

Front Porch Digital is the global market leader in Content Storage Management (CSM) solutions. The company has long been an innovator in delivering unique software, services, and integrated hardware solutions for CSM to broadcasters and media companies worldwide. Today, Front Porch Digital’s patented CSM technologies are found in more than 200 installations in more than 45 countries, representing 7.5 million hours of content and more than 50 PB of data under management distinguished for superior functionality, scalability, performance, and customer satisfaction. Front Porch Digital’s award-winning DIVArchive technology manages the largest broadcast archives in operation for the world’s best-known media brands. More information is available at www.fpdigital.com.

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