Chicago-Based Museum of Broadcast Communications Continues With Cleversafe

Cleversafe Inc. announced a milestone as the storage solution for the Chicago-based Museum of Broadcast Communications (MBC). Cleversafe’s Dispersed Storage technology stores and protects historic radio and television content while providing a delivery system to a global audience of approximately 70,000 registered MBC members.

    Photo of Edgar Bergen
     with Mortimer Snerd
        (MBC Collection)

MBC began working with Cleversafe in 2009, storing its data across four geographically dispersed locations to provide access to digital content to Internet users around the world. Cleversafe’s dsNet system is designed to store MBC’s 400,000 videos without incurring costly overhead in storage and bandwidth, while providing the scalability to easily match capacity need as MBC’s digital content continues to grow. When users view content on the MBC website, the data is pulled directly from a Cleversafe dsNet system saving MBC money and physical space without sacrificing performance or scalability for their end users. Based on the ability to access more content easily, the numbers of viewers has risen rapidly with more than 4.5 million unique visitors since 2009.

Since 1987, the MBC’s goal has been to collect, preserve and stream a wide array of historic and contemporary radio and television programs. Viewers can enjoy classic Super Bowl tech commercials such as Apple’s ‘1984’ or Xerox’s 1977 ‘scribing monk.’  

MBC is currently constructing a new, 62,000-square-foot national broadcast museum in the heart of downtown Chicago. The new location will include expanded areas for collection development, two exhibit galleries and working radio and television studios. Over 240,000 visitors from across the country are projected for the first year of operation.

"Cleversafe is instrumental in our success, and they really serve as the backbone of the organization since they’re responsible for storing our most valuable assets," said Bruce DuMont, founder and president of MBC. "Cleversafe’s scalable technology enables MBC to continue digitizing and distributing historic content cost effectively, while also meeting our long-term preservation goals with their guaranteed data integrity."

"We’re honored that we can continue to support MBC’s mission to preserve and share the historical landmarks of broadcasting," said Chris Gladwin, president and CEO of Cleversafe. "Our technology gives the MBC peace of mind knowing their digital content is protected at the highest levels, but still provides the flexibility to expand their offerings."

Traditional storage systems, which typically store content on an array of mechanical disk drives with multiple copies for increased data protection, are expensive to store multimedia content. Cleversafe’s technology defies conventional storage pitfalls by using an algorithm to divide data into ‘slices’ and dispersing them, via secure network connections, to multiple storage nodes on a dsNet system. Each individual slice contains too little information to be useful, but any threshold of the slices can be used to bit-perfectly recreate the original data.