NAB 2012: revolutionQ calling from Quantel
Quantel unveiled revolutionQ, a new software architecture that it insists heralds a real revolution in broadcast production. Using low cost COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) storage allows customers to choose their hardware platform. With revolutionQ and low cost storage, years of content can be stored online and immediately available to multiple users. Ingest becomes archive; Hierarchical Storage Management is obsolete.
It’s fighting talk, but revolutionQ architecture integrates fully with Quantel’s current Enterprise sQ systems, continuing Quantel’s tradition of protecting customers’ investments for the long term.According to the company, revolutionQ enables true fast turnaround workflows and scales to handle magazine and programme production too. What’s more, a major US broadcaster has made a multi-million dollar investment with Quantel for revolutionQ technology.
“revolutionQ architecture is modular, utilizes open standards and leverages SOA, with everything loosely coupled in a highly resilient, modern infrastructure that enables multiple components from different manufacturers to work together seamlessly,” says Quantel.
What’s interesting is that revolutionQ allows users to take full advantage of low cost COTS storage to enable years of content to be stored online. The continued dramatic reduction in the cost of storage fundamentally alters the balance in production economics, opening up a new world where everything is open to change. Media organizations no longer need to worry about deleting or moving content to archive: ingest becomes the archive, dramatically simplifying systems, increasing access and reducing costs. Total storage can scale to many Petabytes; and the possibility of having decades of content online and instantly accessible is now a reality.
At NAB Quantel showed editing between native i-Frame and long-GOP content. With years of content online, finding the right clips becomes even more crucial. revolutionQ stores schema-free metadata and provides web-like search tools, giving it the flexibility to handle today’s metadata schemas and to meet future demands – whatever they may be.
revolutionQ supports realtime ingest of hundreds of live streams simultaneously, with hundreds of users able to access all media within seconds of it beginning to arrive on the storage. Editors have instant access to the vast online store, without needing to navigate via a separate archive system, dramatically reducing cost and complexity. What in the past would have required a partial archive restore becomes just a natural system function.
revolutionQ is not just for large broadcasters. The new architecture supports any scale of operation cost-effectively, allowing all media organizations to benefit and enables incremental growth strategies.
Key to delivering the agility that large scale, fast-turnaround operations require is the Quantel Virtual File System (QVFS). Incoming streams are analysed in realtime and identity is asserted on every frame. This allows users to start working with material close to live rather than waiting for the entire file to be ingested. revolutionQ uses industry-standard AS-02 bundles as the storage structure, enabling multiple native media formats and metadata schemas to be flexibly stored.
“We want our customers to be able to take full advantage of economies opened up by large scale COTS hardware,” said Quantel CEO, Ray Cross. “To do this we have built a new, totally open software architecture. revolutionQ transcends formats, metadata, and scale considerations to provide a unified, open, future-capable production environment. This new way of building broadcast systems is a revolution for our industry and it’s being driven by Quantel innovation.”