Omneon Video Networks and AM Tecnología (AMTEC) today announced that Grupo Televisa, the world’s largest Spanish language media corporation, has purchased an Omneon MediaGrid™ active storage system and five Omneon Spectrum™ media servers for ingest, storage, and playout in their Chapultepec and Santa Fe facilities, both located in Mexico City.
 
“Our overall corporate vision is to implement a tapeless workflow and media asset management system across all of our facilities,” said Jorge Cosio Coronado, technical manager for Televisa Canales, the broadcast technology center located in the Chapultepec facility. “With format independence as well as its scalability and reliability, the MediaGrid and Spectrum systems give us a solid infrastructure on which to execute this strategy.”
 
From its Chapultepec facility, Televisa produces news and other programming, and broadcasts three major national channels and one local channel. At the Santa Fe facility, the company produces reality shows and other programming, and ingests commercials for playout.

Televisa selected the MediaGrid active storage system for its ability to both provide high-capacity central storage for digital media, as well as act as a high-performance production server. The 24-TB MediaGrid system at the Chapultepec facility will act as a central near-line repository for content, storing finished material that will be moved to Spectrum servers for playout and to Televisa Canales’ media asset management (MAM) system for archive. It will also provide edit-in-place storage for multiple Apple® Final Cut Pro® editors.

AMTEC collaborated with Omneon and Televisa to design and install part of the new tapeless system at Televisa Canales. Four of the five Omneon Spectrum systems are in the Chapultepec facility, with two designated for main and mirrored playout, the third for archiving, and the fourth for ingest, primarily for recording long-form content. Each server includes 16 SD channels and one HD channel, configured for a variety of functions including preview, high-resolution quality control, ingest, and playout. The fifth server has been installed at the Santa Fe facility for ingest of commercials. Once the commercials are ingested, they are transferred under the control of AVECO ASTRA automation over a private fiber optic network to the main mirrored playout servers at Chapultepec.

The Spectrum servers interface with the Televisa Canales MAM system, provided by Tedial. Through the Tedial interface, the Omneon media servers communicate with Televisa’s corporate MAM system, receiving content from a variety of sources under the control of AVECO automation. To move more than 10,000 files from legacy servers to the Omneon systems, Televisa is using Omneon’s MigrateTool™ in combination with Tektronix Cerify™ for quality control. Televisa Canales also uses Snell & Wilcox Memphis™ encoders to ingest content and commercials in HD format.

“It is exciting to see how leading media companies, such as Televisa, are installing advanced information technologies to streamline their workflows and improve the efficiency of their operations,” said Geoff Stedman, vice president of worldwide marketing for Omneon. “We designed our Spectrum and MediaGrid platforms to provide the level of flexibility and openness needed to support an end-to-end workflow and enable smart, efficient handling of media assets. The integrated environment being deployed by Televisa is nothing short of world class, and we are extremely pleased to be a core part of it.”

About Omneon
Omneon is a leading provider of flexible media server and active storage systems that optimize workflow productivity and on-air reliability for the production, distribution, and management of digital media. Omneon is a pioneer in the use of advanced IT technologies and open systems for broadcast applications, producing a modular and expandable video server architecture in the Omneon Spectrum. The company's MediaGrid active storage system delivers centralized content storage that is scalable in capacity, bandwidth, and media-processing power. The company has an extensive global presence with customers in 45 countries on six continents. Omneon is on the Web at www.Omneon.com.

About Televisa
Grupo Televisa, S.A., is the largest media company in the Spanish-speaking world and a major participant in the international entertainment business. It has interests in television production and broadcasting, production of pay television networks, international distribution of television programming, direct-to-home satellite services, publishing and publishing distribution, cable television, radio production and broadcasting, professional sports and live entertainment, feature film production and distribution, and the operation of a horizontal Internet portal.

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