NAB Perspectives: Front Porch Digital SVP of Strategic Sales Dave Polyard

The way sports-content owners store their media seems to be rocketing towards the cloud in recent years, and Front Porch Digital is very much on board. At NAB 2013, Front Porch has debuted LYNX, a cloud-based enterprise-scale content-storage–management (CSM) system. While NAB is chock-full of cloud-based products, Front Porch Digital SVP of Strategic Sales Dave Polyard believes LYNX has a leg up.

“We are hearing a lot about the cloud, but I think there is a real need to develop more comfort around that concept,” says Polyard. “If you are putting your stuff up there [in the cloud], there is always a concern of knowing where it is and if it is safe. Our cloud solution is a private cloud where we manage the facility. We can tell you exactly where the content is and that we have multiple copies of it. We know where your stuff is, and we can show it to you.”

The company is showing LYNXdr and LYNXlocal at the show. LYNXdr is a hosted disaster-recovery service that allows global media enterprises to centralize critical assets and consolidate operations, and LYNXlocal is a simple extension to LYNX that operates locally as an appliance, caching cloud content and providing integration to specialized systems if needed. LYNXlocal is billed as a service element at a low monthly rate.

Sports Remains Key
Front Porch Digital has seen a few key sports-client additions recently — most notably the San Francisco 49ers — with more on the horizon, according to Polyard. While sports represents a major growth industry for Front Porch, it is these clients’ unique — and extremely diverse — needs that set it apart for Polyard.

“If you are a [sports client], you don’t want to tie your storage to just one user system,” he says. “You want to store content that can be accessible to multiple systems. That is what the 49ers and a lot of other organizations are looking to accomplish. You want a central repository that has the ability to serve multiple use cases: coaches, production, the scoreboard, or the coaches show. You don’t want to limit your content to one use.”

Odds and Ends
In addition to Lynx, Front Porch Digital is showcasing the latest versions of its DIVAdirector media-asset management (MAM) system and DIVArchive content-storage management (CSM) system.

DIVAdirector V5.1 is a permission-based Web application that enables complete access to file-based content stored by DIVArchive. DIVAdirector 5.1 addresses LYNX-specific workflows and requirements such as site awareness, with a single DIVAdirector system showing the enterprise content view of assets stored in different archive systems — local, networked, or cloud-based systems, or any combination thereof — with integrated user permissions controlling access.

New features to DIVArchive V7.1 include AXF Explorer, which offers an intuitive interface for parsing Archive eXchange Format (AXF) objects using drag-and-drop procedures just like in the Windows operating system. DIVArchive V7.1 also enables a complete range of world-class video transcoding and workflows and is directly integrated with Telestream’s Vantage Transcode and Vantage Transcode Pro.