ASI logging at SRG

SRG SSR Idée Suisse, short SRG SSR, is the largest provider of electronic media in Switzerland. Its services are national, multi-medial and multilingual, encompassing seven television channels, 16 radio stations in the four national languages, websites in ten different languages and tele-text in German, French and Italian. The SRG SSR recently purchased a system for redundant ASI stream logging. It is being used for the compliance recording (legal logging) of an MPEG-2 Transport Stream containing several television and radio channels, including one HD television channel. Because the SRG SSR is required to store everything they broadcast for up to four months, a storage capacity of 50 TB was needed to accommodate this need. Storage only is not sufficient for SRG SSR; the company has the obligation to file recorded data as well. We supplied for this need an application able to very easily playback the recorded transport stream of any given time, without the need to select every file individually. The described system is only stage one of the full program.
In stage two, every channel in the transport stream will be decoded and stored separately. This means that every channel will be individually recorded on only one logger, and eventually can be encoded to an easily playable media format (in both high quality and low quality) eliminating the need for a specific play out application. For these low quality encoded files another 6 TB is going to be needed to compensate this additional data.
SRG SSR’s System currently consists of the following:
- Two ASI Stream Loggers (fully redundant), capable of logging a Multi Program MPEG-2 Transport Stream
- An ASI Fetcher server. The fetcher gathers all of the data from the loggers and stores it on the 50TB storage array.
- An ASI play out client application, capable of playing back any given time with in the 4 months of available data.
In stage two the system will consist of:
- Two ASI Stream Loggers (fully redundant), capable of logging and transcoding every radio and television program within the Multi Program MPEG-2 Transport Stream separately.
- A LogDepot Fetcher server. The fetcher gathers all the AV material and data from the loggers and stores it onto multiple storage arrays.
- The LogDepot Web Client. This will allow playback with Internet Explorer on any client PC in the network.