Active Circle Chosen by OL TV

Active Circle announces that OL TV, the official channel of the Olympique Lyonnais soccer team, has deployed its software solution to manage, store and index their video content.

The content is copied, indexed and written to LTO tapes; then it is deleted from the Xserve storage in order to free up space. At the center of the solution, sold by CTM, is the Active Circle software. The solution includes an LTO tape library and the Active Media Explorer (AME) interface, which provides indexing and low-resolution viewing of the media.

The Olympique Lyonnais is one of the most successful French soccer teams in recent years, dominating the Ligue 1 championship. The OL TV channel started to broadcast in 2005, with content exclusively related to the club.

The content is produced digitally and increases rapidly each season. Originally, the produced content was stored directly to disk, then copied on external hard drives. This decentralized structure had reached its limit; it became difficult to ensure that the media were secure and to search and find specific content.

In 2011, to respond to this dual challenge, the technical team led by Nicolas Houël made the decision to restructure the way the video content was being stored and managed. Following an evaluation of the solutions available on the market, the project team leaned towards the Active Circle product offered by CSolutions.

"This solution was the only one that matched our criteria for long-term storage and easy access," said Nicolas Houël, technical manager.

The system is based on a server, a near-line disk space and an LTO-5 library for the long-term archive. A distinctive feature of the Active Circle system is that it manages the LTO tape storage like a disk, using a file system interface to access archived content, even when it’s located on tape.

On the user side, OL TV opted for AME (Active Media Explorer), a web interface for viewing media and providing access to the archives. It indexes the data and automatically generates low-resolution proxies in H264 format for viewing the media.

The users browse the Archive with the Active Media Explorer, which allows viewing to avoid choosing the wrong media for retrieval.

At the same time the technical team has direct access to the archives.

"Active Circle gives access to the content both using a web interface and in file mode," emphasizes Eric Lacroix, project manager and administrator for the OL TV solutions.

In the end two seemingly contradictory goals are met: preserving the media assets of OL TV in the long term by using a centralized model and storage on LTO tape, while improving the ease of access to the archives.