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STREETS AHEAD - AND SAVED FOR POSTERITY!
From STORAGE Magazine
Vol 5 No 02 - March 2005
The Information Please online almanac lists just two inspiring milestones
for 1969. One is Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon. The other is the
debut of Sesame Street, the landmark educational show that introduced the
world’s children to Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch and Cookie Monster.
Thirty-five years later, Sesame Street and its lovable characters continue to
delight millions of children speaking more than a dozen languages in 148
countries on six continents.
Now, with help from Nexsan and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST),
the non-profit Sesame Workshop has a new digital asset management solution that
not only preserves Sesame Street episodes for posterity, but also gives the
kiddies’ favourite a leg up on productivity for re-purposing content in future
productions.
“We use and reuse our content because the basic educational lessons don’t
change. Children still need to learn their A-B-Cs and 1-2-3s,” says Sherra
Pierre-March, Sesame Workshop vice president of information systems. “That’s why
a show in 2004 can have segments that go back to 2000 or 1994, or even 1969.”
From Manual to Online Access
Though Sesame Workshop is best known in the United States for producing Sesame
Street and a host of other children’s shows, it also provides content to
producers of children’s shows in other countries. The non-profit organisation
also manages the licensing of Sesame Street characters for books, toys, games,
clothing and other popular retail merchandise.
Historically, the process of providing material has been manual. Video and audio
content were stored on reels of tape, photographs and other artwork were locked
in file cabinets, and digital content was spread across a variety of different
servers in multiple locations.
“Our company is not so different from other industries that face time-to-market
challenges,” adds Pierre-March. “We recognised that we needed to improve how we
delivered content to better compete – to sell more efficiently, to close
contracts more quickly, to get licensees the content they needed faster.”
In defining a solution, Pierre-March identified three specific objectives.
First, Sesame Workshop required a solution for effectively mining and accessing
content, so that it could be repurposed for other uses. This had technical
implications, in terms of how the content was organised, stored and secured from
misuse.
Second, the company needed a more efficient means of working with its large
variety of partners around the globe – from publishing houses, to television
production and distribution companies, to licensed merchandise manufacturers.
And third, Sesame Workshop wanted to improve its ability to aggregate content
around specific themes. “Looking at individual pieces of content is a good
start,” Pierre-March explains, “but we asked ourselves how we could better
structure our creative assets so that we and our licensees could more quickly
pick and draw content to support any given theme.”
Big Disk Storage from Nexsan
Pierre-March and her team spent six months defining a solution that supported
each of these objectives. “Projects like this are huge exercises in risk and
reward, because getting technologies to work together can be very challenging.
Our plan was to build an open architecture that used standards like XML and SOAP
– technologies that would give us flexibility to extend and expand the system.”
With the architecture defined, the company set about finding partners with the
right products, as well as core competencies for marrying different technologies
together. Sesame Workshop selected Nexsan’s award-winning 10.5-terabyte ATABeast
as the best choice for its massive, global initiative. The advanced design and
features of the ATABeast, which contains 42 high-capacity 250GB Hitachi Deskstar
drives, enables higher availability and greater data protection of Sesame
Workshop’s assets.
The storage solution is OS independent, needing no special software drivers or
server-based management applications. The ATABeast is connected to an IBM blade
server running database applications that are designed to manage different types
of content. Additionally, the content management software allows Sesame Workshop
to search for information by theme. “The ATABeast storage array drives gives us
the cost-effective speed and reliability we needed,” states Pierre-March.
Early Results Forecast ‘Sunny Days’
Pierre-March hasn’t yet calculated the economic return on investment from the
new storage solution, but has seen two powerful instances of how the system is
already improving productivity.
Globally, Sesame Workshop works with International Television Productions for 20
unique educational programs in 148 countries on six continents. Generally, 70 to
80 per cent of the international show is based on scripts and video from the
U.S. production. In the past, Sesame Workshop would create a domestic reel of
segments that other countries could use for their shows. Putting the reels
together was no simple task; it required knowing what was available, where each
piece of content was located, how it would play in the different countries,
scripting dubbing, editing and other critical steps. The entire process
typically took three or four week just to pull together a single show.
Now that the assets are becoming available online, that time has been trimmed
significantly. “We’ve gone from three or four weeks to just seven days,” says
Pierre-March.
The organisation is also seeing similar productivity and efficiency gains in its
licensing business. “Our licensees used to call and give us a general idea of
what they were looking for. We responded by sending out artwork on DVDs, CDs and
flats, which took time. Plus, if what we shipped didn’t meet the needs of the
licensee, we’d have to go through the entire process again.”
It could take several weeks of effort to satisfy a request for information.
“Now, through a secure portal, we can give licensees direct, real-time assets
online,” Pierre-March explains. “They can choose for themselves, without us
having to act as a middleman.”
The work is not yet completed. So far, the domestic library of video is about
7,000 hours and Sesame Street productions alone will add up to at least 15,000
hours. “We’re digitising entire shows first and then going back and carving up
the segments for further reuse,” says Pierre-March. “We had a lot of work to do
in the database structure and the applications.”
But even the early results are pleasing. “Since we went live, we haven’t seen
any degradation, in terms of how we are able to access content and present it
back,” she points out. “Just last week, we had a large demonstration for some of
our partners. They commented how fast it was in streaming the video.”
Best of all, however, is Pierre-March’s perspective as the top IT executive for
Sesame Workshop. “I don’t hear about the Nexsan ATABeast unless I ask about it,”
she says with a smile. “From where I sit, that’s a very good thing.”
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