Viceland
Viceland
When Viceland was looking for a media storage solution for its new Benelux service, the reliability and ease of integration offered by the pixstor system from pixitmedia made it the ideal choice.
International television network Viceland boasts Emmy Award-nominated shows and culturally relevant content aimed at young people – refecting international perspectives on music, food, news, technology, sex, fashion and more. Owned and programmed by global youth brand Vice Media, Viceland launched in the US and Canada in February 2016 under the direction of Academy Award-winning writer/ director Spike Jonze.
The Viceland network encompasses both linear and digital platforms, and focuses on high- quality original programming, either created in-house or commissioning globally or locally. Since 2016, it has expanded into the UK, Ireland, France, Australia, New Zealand and Sub-Saharan Africa. Earlier this year, the network broadened its reach with the launch of Viceland Benelux.
What we needed was a lot of storage space on a budget, but with a rock-solid file system under the hood. And because the system would be supported remotely, we needed something we could trust to be massively resilient.
Vice Media consulted with pixitmedia to determine how best to create the new Benelux channel infrastructure. The infrastructure would need to include transcoding, QC, MAM connectivity, editing and other applications running off the storage system. pixstor, with a proven track record of reliability and ease of integration with existing infrastructures, was the ideal choice. The system was installed and implemented on- site by ERA and pixitmedia.
IMPLEMENTATION
It was determined that pixstor offered the capacity, scalability and functionality that Viceland Benelux required, largely because its high reliability, performance and ease of integration had worked so well for the Viceland UK operation. Furthermore, Viceland’s media workgroups are typical of the facilities ERA and pixitmedia serve, with workstations and servers running a mix of Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.
Because pixstor is a software-defined scale-out storage solution, Vice could incorporate any storage subsystem it saw fit. The global brand turned to NetApp E-Series, renowned for its extreme bandwidth, enterprise reliability and global support.
NetApp E-Series is the storage array preferred by many post houses and broadcasters because it is the only one with 99.999% reliability. Large broadcast production workgroups and boutique 4K facilities, which have zero tolerance for dropped frames, rely on NetApp E-Series.
Use of ash in hybrid arrays optimises support for ancillary transcoding and rendering workflows. ‘Phone-home’ features alert NetApp of potential disk failures before a hard disk fails, allowing NetApp or pixitmedia to replace the drive without any impact on Viceland’s production workgroups.” – Toby Taylor, Head of The Viceland UK Technical Team.
According to Vice’s vice-president of international operations Tim Bertioli: “Vice’s storage solution needs to be best-in- breed. Ultra-high-performance is, of course, a given requirement, but we also need easy administration and intelligent features, all of which the pixitmedia system provides. In terms of deployment and support, I have now worked with ERA for nearly a decade and knew they could be trusted to deliver.”
