Lifetime Entertainment, a diverse multimedia company that includes Lifetime Television and LMN, has deployed Omneon Spectrum media server systems to support tapeless SD ingest and playout of four channels at its new 50,000sq-ft technical facility in Manhattan.
Lifetime’s operation was designed to merge broadcast and IT technology into a seamless and efficient file-based workflow from ingest to storage, playout and archiving.
Designed to accommodate growth, Lifetime’s facility currently includes nine active editing rooms with space for three more, as well as five master control pods — two running the SD networks, one running the HD network and one each for engineering and training — and four quality-control (QC) rooms. At the heart of Lifetime’s on-air SD environment are three Omneon Spectrum server systems. Following post production, content in the form of high-resolution 50Mb/s MPEG files are transcoded to a Spectrum system used for staging and material prep. After content review under the control of Harris automation, files are passed to a larger, online pair of Spectrum playout servers, providing full redundancy to the playout system. Material that is not needed within a certain timeframe is moved to nearline or long-term archive under the management of a Masstech MassStore system.
An innovative element of the operation, affording additional redundancy and security, is that all content is played down three hours in advance of airtime and cached, so by the time programming airs, technicians have plenty of opportunity to correct a problem and even to preview the fix.
Lifetime has recently launched an HD simulcast of its LMN service using a fourth Spectrum system for playout, and also relies on a fifth Spectrum server for backup at its disaster-recovery operation, located in Tappan, NY, where about three days of programming content is being automatically mirrored on a full-time basis.
For more information, visit www.omneon.com.