BroadcastPro roundtable on storage brings key players together

BroadcastPro Middle East held its first successful roundtable as part of its WorkshopPro 2012 series at the Fairmont Hotel yesterday in association with EMC Isilon and systems integrator INC. The key topic of discussion was digital archiving and storage in the region and was intended to bring together a small group of key players in the market to share information and encourage collaboration.

The discussion was led by David Sallak, chief strategist for media for EMC Isilon. Sallak is based in the US and plays the role of a business strategist enabling broadcast entities to adopt new technologies. Having worked with ITV, UK; Channels nine and ten in Australia; NBC and ABC in the US and Televisa and Mega in Central and South America among many others, Sallak brought a wealth of knowledge to the discussion filling the gaps while encouraging local players to talk about the challenges they face, the trends they are looking to adopt and if they are ready to undertake archiving projects at their respective facilities.

The roundtable was attended by some of the senior broadcast engineers, chief technology officers and consultants in the local industry (We’ll have all the pics and details in the next issue). Representatives from Abu Dhabi Media, Al Jazeera, Dubai Media Inc, MBC, OSN, WRN Broadcast, twofour54 and Media Master discussed long term archiving plans.

Discussions centred around what would be the most appropriate way to archive existing content, which format would be most ideal, how to monetise one’s archives and whether cloud was a safe option presently for storing premium content.

It again became clear that local players were looking to form a body that would agree on a standard format for the storage of data to facilitate greater collaboration between entities in the future.

Details will be available in the April edition of BroadcastPro Middle East magazine.