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At the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) 2004 convention recently held in Las Vegas, Nev., Silicon Graphics won three prestigious awards for innovative broadcast installations on three continents. The Pro-MPEG Forum, an international association of broadcasters and manufacturers dedicated to interoperability of television equipment, presented an MXF Award to Premier Media Group, in association with SGI, for "outstanding commitment to the implementation of MXF"(Material eXchange Format). Premier Media Group, operators of FOX SPORTS ONE and TWO in Sydney, Australia, selected SGI for its recent design and installation of a truly state-of-the-art complete digital infrastructure for end-to-end D10/MXF based broadcast operations. MXF is a key enabler for the introduction and accelerated use of AV/IT technology in broadcasting. Broadcast Engineering's Excellence Awards, recognizing leading-edge design and systems integration, were presented to two major broadcasters using SGI Media Server(TM) for broadcast and SGI® InfiniteStorage end-to-end solutions. Georgia Public Broadcasting won first place in the magazine's "New Studio Technology-Station" category, and German public television station Sudwestrundfunk (SWR or Southwestern Broadcasting) won first place for "News Room Technology-Station." This year's winners were selected based on voting by readers who visited the Broadcast Engineering Web site. Broadcast Engineering's Excellence Awards plaques were proudly displayed in the SGI booth on the NAB 2004 show floor. "SGI and our broadcasting customers are very pleased to be honored by the Pro-MPEG Forum, where SGI has long played a role in the drive for open standards and by Broadcast Engineering, the industry 'bible' for television engineers. These industry awards reflect what SGI television broadcast customers already know: SGI designs and delivers the most advanced broadcast technology available, technology that delivers greater flexibility, faster time-to-air and smoother operations in any format," said Chris Golson, senior director, Media Industries, SGI. "It's no accident that all three winning broadcast installations use SGI Media Server for broadcast systems. These servers are designed to support the MXF standard, which facilitates sharing of material between systems and improve the broadcaster's workflow. All three broadcasters also use SGI InfiniteStorage solutions including SGI Origin 300 series servers as metadata or file servers in conjunction with either SGI TP9100 series storage or SGI collaborator Hitachi Lightning 9980V disk storage. And perhaps most importantly, all three broadcasters use SGI InfiniteStorage Shared Filesystem CXFS, which allows instantaneous sharing of files -- without copying -- from multiple operating systems, including SGI IRIX, Mac OS X, Linux and Windows. We're pleased that SGI is becoming a recognized leader in advanced IP-based broadcasting technology for ingest, digital storage and archiving, and play-to-air," added Golson. The MXF Award was presented to SGI on behalf of Premier Media Group at the MXF Launch Reception during NAB2004. A high profile event, the reception was attended by more than 250 VIPs and press. The event celebrated both the successful completion of the standardization of MXF through Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) and also the fact that many MXF products were already in evidence at dozens of manufacturers booths on the show floor. Broad industry acceptance of the interchange file format is expected. "We are very pleased to present an MXF Award to Premier Media Group in association with Pro-MPEG Forum member SGI, for their outstanding contributions to MXF and for furthering the format's commercialization," said Pro-MPEG Forum chairman Nick Wells of the BBC. "When we embarked on this project four years ago, there was no guarantee of success. The amount of cooperation and the level of expertise required to create the MXF format was daunting. However, under the guidance of major broadcasters worldwide the panel of specialists did a remarkable job in developing, testing and then documenting a format that responded fully to the user requirements." Premier Media Group Based in Sydney, New South Wales, and employing approximately 200 people on its premises, Premier Media Group chose SGI's ingest and storage solution to overcome the bottlenecks and restrictions of tape-based ingest workflow and help move the operation to a fully digital infrastructure to support an increase in new digital program outputs. Two new channels, FUEL and HOW TO, have been added to their channel lineup of FOX SPORTS ONE and TWO, as well as interactive services. SGI Professional Services is prime contractor and integrator for the digital archive component. Core components for the new channels were up and running and on air in March 2004. This new infrastructure is based on SGI Media Server for broadcast systems for ingest (up to 16 feeds) and transmission, SGI® InfiniteStorage Shared Filesystem CXFS(TM) Storage Area Network (SAN), and Ardendo's suite of ingest and asset management software tools for content management. Premier Media Group greatly improves efficiency and productivity with the SGI® Origin® 350 CXFS SAN server, which also hosts SGI® Data Migration Facility (DMF) software, providing user configurable software tools to manage migration of media between SGI® InfiniteStorage TP9100 and TP9300 disk-based storage and the PetaSite® datatape archive. Fox Sports now enjoys an enhanced workflow, which is unified across the whole facility, unprecedented interoperability and full asset management capability. SWR SWR has three broadcast sites in Germany, one in each of the cities of Baden-Baden, Mainz and Stuttgart, reaching 14 million viewers. SWR is one of the first German public broadcasting stations, and belongs to ARD, the first German public television network. SWR tapped SGI to implement a tapeless digital newsroom that now enables its 50-person news team at the Mainz facility to streamline its operations for distributed news production and play-to-air. As an open and flexible system was critical to their success now and in the future, the SWR project team chose the solution designed by SGI Professional Services, which was also the prime systems integrator. This ingest, storage, editing and playout solution is based on SGI Media Server for broadcast systems (configured for DVCPRO25), as well as SGI InfiniteStorage solutions built around the SGI® Origin® 300 server and SGI® TP9400 disk storage system, Pinnacle Liquid blue(TM) non-linear editors, Dalet-ANN Newsroom Computer Systems, SGT's Media Manager, DBOS Newsroom Automation System and MPEG-1 Video Browser/Editor. SWR's Mainz facility went on air in February 2003 and immediately experienced greater flexibility, faster time-to-air, and smoother news operations. In late 2003, SWR commissioned SGI once again, to build a digital infrastructure for its studio in Stuttgart. Using the same core SGI components as the Mainz facility, the server-based, new digital workflow will enable SWR's second studio based on SGI technology to produce and transmit its news programs in a nearly tapeless manner. SWR's team in Stuttgart will gain highly streamlined creation and operation capabilities-beginning with ingest and direct access to video assets on central storage all the way through to playout from the SGI Media Server for broadcast and SGI InfiniteStorage solutions. SWR's Stuttgart facility is expected to be broadcasting using the new SGI digital infrastructure in the second half of 2004. Georgia Public Broadcasting Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB) provides multiple channels of television and radio public broadcasting and a rapidly growing Internet streaming media service to educators throughout Georgia. In early 2002, GPB selected the Broadcast Solutions Group of systems contractor MCSi with SGI Professional Services to transition their infrastructure to an open digital format. To better serve their approximately two million weekly viewers, Georgia Public Broadcasting -- parent of Georgia Public Television (GPTV) and PeachStar Satellite Services -- purchased two high-performance, SGI Origin 300 systems that act as gateway servers to the GPB facility's existing computer systems, including IRIX®, Windows®, Macintosh®, Linux® and other UNIX® environments. The two Origin 300 servers utilize SGI CXFS shared filesystem software to allow GPB computer systems connectivity to the 4TB of storage area network (SAN) storage provided by an Hitachi Lightning 9980V(TM) storage system running across two 2Gb Fibre Channel switches. For standard- definition video playout, GPB will use multiple SGI Media Server for broadcast systems equipped for MPEG-2 playout and FTP file transfer capabilities. To handle the demands of high-definition television (HDTV) and pre-compressed ASI video playout, GPB is purchasing SGI Media Server systems for DVB-ASI record and playout capabilities.