BBC Studios and Post Production installs Front Porch systems

The BBC Studios and Post Production’s Digital Media Services business – the commercial subsidiary of the BBC that preserves, remasters and manages content for clients such as Imperial War Museums – is installing Front Porch Digital’s DIVArchive CSM and DIVAdirector media asset management (MAM) systems.

The systems will allow the Digital Media Services team to provide secure long-term storage for clients’ assets alongside existing services such as film and tape digitisation, digital image restoration and Digital Production Partnership (DPP) delivery, enabling a true end-to-end digitisation, transcoding, restoration and archive service.

“We are extending our existing services to provide reliable and secure off-site backup. This provides our clients with a simple disaster recovery option, safeguarding their precious assets and eliminating the need to invest in their own expensive archives,” said Kevin Shaw, lead technologist at BBC Studios and Post Production Digital Media Services. “In the case of larger customers that are looking to set up their own archives, we already offer a consulting service, and the addition of Front Porch Digital products broadens the scope of the advice and assistance we can offer them.”

The DIVArchive and DIVAdirector systems will store, or fully or partially restore, the DPP asset and check the integrity of any asset via checksum calculation and tracking. The systems will also speed up the workflow when content is being ingested for long-term archiving, eliminating the need to transfer or deliver large amounts of data to clients. The Digital Media Services business can now also offer migration to new formats as part of its services in order to future-proof clients’ assets.

DIVAdirector will allow the Digital Media Services team to create a consistent metadata database as a future resource while DIVArchive provides a cost-effective interim storage solution at very short notice.

“BBC Studios and Post Production’s Digital Media Services team is an award-winning resource in the UK for helping content owners conserve and maximise the value of their material,” said Rino Petricola, COO and general manager at Front Porch Digital. “It’s gratifying that Front Porch Digital systems will play a role in this important effort by further enhancing the one-stop digitisation, transcoding, restoration, and secure archiving service the team already provides.”