As consumer demand for video increases, the range of delivery models continues to expand. The challenge facing today’s broadcasters and service providers is to select the technology that can keep pace with this explosion in demand, while anticipating future channel delivery infrastructures and behavioral trends. Computer and storage clouds promise to supplement and ultimately replace today’s media factories, but for these implementations to be truly beneficial, the applications and solutions they deploy must be designed to offer maximum flexibility and control.

A file-based media services workflow will typically involve receiving very large files from a variety of sources, often at unpredictable times and in uneven volumes. The operations to be performed on those files also vary, from customer to customer and file to file. This is a work pattern that is particularly suited to a highly scalable, highly flexible, programmable infrastructure.

Unique among available server architectures, Dalet Brio combines both IT-based video server and a set of workflow tools that make it extremely easy to integrate into SDI environments.

The fully IT-based open technology that runs on Dalet Brio makes it an enterprise-class server respecting failsafe security and reliability with built-in redundancy but without the locked-off inflexibilities of proprietary equipment.

Its high density and modular design enables Brio to accommodate as many input and output ports as required and it is massively scalable to meet growth. Units can work either with their own local storage or directly attached to a SAN or in a hybrid configuration. The open design affords an easy integration of multiple boxes on one shared storage environment, ready for the needs of tomorrow.

What’s more, operators can buy Brio as a turnkey video server or as a kit with video cards and timecode cards sourced according to particular IT infrastructure needs.

A rich set of apps, from confidence monitoring to graphics insertion, built around Dalet Brio make it easier to ingest and playback large quantities of very large files. Common compute resources can perform an auto QC at one moment and then be re-allocated to perform a transcode at another. This allows operators to achieve much greater efficiency from their infrastructure.

The agility of a software-based open IT server further benefits agility in codec support. Dalet Brio supports a very wide range of software codecs and can play any supported files, including a mix of SD and HD, on the same timeline. It allows for on-the-fly cross-, up- and down-conversion of the video signal, as well as aspect ratio modifications.

Over the next few years, operators will increasingly look to harness the flexibility and power of open IT technology offering very high levels of channel resilience and interoperability, with the understanding that non-proprietary systems can alter the economic basis for channel creation and operations significantly.

To learn more, see the Dalet Brio page.