Canada’s Global TV Installs Front Porch DIVArchive Solution

Front Porch Digital announced that Global Television Network, one of Canada’s leading broadcasters, will expand its implementation of the company’s DIVArchive solution for content storage management (CSM) as part of a fundamental reconfiguration of its production workflow from centralized to regional playout hubs. Set for completion in 2009, the innovative new workflow will enable Global TV to cost-effectively improve operations and prepare infrastructure for the transition to HD while also maintaining its commitment to local markets.

"We selected DIVArchive because it serves as a single, unifying platform that allows us to manage our news content," said Geoff Franklin, Global Television’s manager of digital asset management. "This capability makes DIVArchive unique and, when compared with other systems, represents significant cost savings for us."

Based on a combination of software and hardware components integrated to provide a turnkey solution, Front Porch’s DIVArchive is a uniquely flexible CSM solution that simplifies the process of preserving, managing, and accessing content for operations of all sizes. At Global TV, DIVArchive will be implemented at four regional broadcast centers spread out across Canada’s five and one-half time zones and linked with high-speed connectivity. The four centers, located in Vancouver (CHAN), Toronto (CIII), Edmonton (CITV), and Calgary (CICT), will ingest and play out digital news content produced by all of Global Television’s 14 stations. Under the new workflow, each of the four broadcast centers is expected to process as much as five times the content it is processing now.

DIVArchive will facilitate the identification, storage, and retrieval of content flowing into each of the broadcast centers. Interfacing with a Thomson Grass Valley digital newsroom system, Global TV editors located anywhere on the network will rely on DIVArchive to browse, call up, edit, share, and distribute files across the production centers as well as Global Television’s smaller stations. In addition, DIVArchive will enable repurposing of programming for multimodal distribution including the Web and mobile phones.

"Global Television is undertaking an ambitious and innovative project that will provide the foundation for business and popular success for many years to come," said Mike Knaisch, president and CEO of Front Porch Digital. "By enabling diverse systems to work together to manage the sharing, repurposing, and distribution of content, our DIVArchive solution becomes a key component of that project."