Releases

posted on 14 August 2008 16:56

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Seagate Technology:
The Seagate® Barracuda® ES Series is the hard drive of choice for NBC’s coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

The Seagate hard drives are powering 20 Omneon MediaDeck servers to digitize and ingest HD coverage from the Olympic Games. The video files are actively transferred, while still being recorded, to a MediaGrid active storage system in Beijing then to a second MediaGrid storage system in New York.

-- The media servers and storage systems allow NBC to present more than 3,600 hours of coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the most ambitious single media project in history and more than the combined total of every Summer Olympics ever televised in the United States.

-- NBC’s coverage will average nearly 212 hours per day for 17 days – more than 8 days of coverage during every single day of the Olympics.

-- Seagate storage is enabling Olympics viewers around the world to watch what they want, whenever they want and wherever they want:

-- Seagate donated a number of its FreeAgent Pro external drives and 1TB Barracuda desktop drives to photographers from China's Digi-Life magazine, who documented the construction of the mammoth Beijing Olympic Stadium, also known as the "Bird's Nest". The stadium covers 258,000 square meters and holds more than 90,000 people.

“NBC needs to capture every second of every competition at multiple venues in China, quickly turning them into dynamic programming for television and Internet broadcasting – nothing can fall through the cracks,” said Bill Schilling, marketing director at Seagate. “We welcomed the opportunity to work with Omneon to support NBC for its Olympics coverage. Omneon is the market leader for developing storage solutions for broadcast video, which is becoming more prevalent via the Web, especially for hugely popular sporting events like the Olympics.”

“For the first time, the average American will be able to create their own unique Olympic experience whether at home, at the office or on-the-go,” said Dick Ebersol, Chairman, NBC Universal Sports & Olympics and Executive Producer of NBCU's Olympic coverage. “With 25 sports streamed live at NBCOlympics.com and significant live coverage on our cable platforms and NBC, highlighted by all swimming finals, the biggest nights of gymnastics and beach volleyball live in primetime, the viewer has plenty of options for live coverage. In the 41 years since my first Olympics, it's staggering to me to be involved in a Games where we are producing 2,900 hours of live coverage - especially from an Olympics half-a-world away. It's more live coverage from a single Olympics than the total of all previous Summer Olympics combined. The enormity of what we're doing just blows me away.”

“Because the workflow must be seamless and the nature of the programming is so significant, we decided to use Seagate’s enterprise hard drives, which are the best fit for our needs in terms of reliability, best-in-class design and unrivaled performance,” said Geoff Stedman, SVP products and markets at Omneon.

About Seagate

Seagate is the worldwide leader in the design, manufacture and marketing of hard disc drives and storage solutions, providing products for a wide-range of applications, including Enterprise, Desktop, Mobile Computing, Consumer Electronics and Branded Solutions. Seagate’s business model leverages technology leadership and world-class manufacturing to deliver industry-leading innovation and quality to its global customers, with the goal of being the time-to-market leader in all markets in which it participates. The company is committed to providing award-winning products, customer support and reliability to meet the world’s growing demand for information storage. Seagate can be found around the globe and at http://www.seagate.com.

About NBC Olympics

NBC, “America’s Olympic Network,” owns the exclusive U.S. media rights to the Olympic Games, television’s most powerful property, through 2012, which includes Beijing in 2008, Vancouver in 2010 and London in 2012. From August 8-24, 2008 NBC Universal will present an unprecedented 3,600 hours of coverage, highlighted by NBC in primetime with live swimming, gymnastics and beach volleyball. In August 2004, 203 million viewers watched as the networks of NBC Universal — NBC®, MSNBC®, CNBC®, USA®, Bravo®, Telemundo®, and NBC’s HD affiliates — offered a then record 1,210 hours of Olympic coverage from Athens. For additional information, go to NBCOlympics.com, a year-round destination for fans of Olympic sports, featuring news, Beijing previews, athlete features, expert blogs, photos, Olympic video from the NBC archives and social tools enabling users to build communities around their favorite sports, post comments and blogs.

About Omneon

Omneon, Inc. is a leading provider of scalable 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™ media server system. 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 55 countries on six continents.

^{[Formatted by Paul Warren.]}