BoB (Box of Broadcasts) National Provides 2M TV and Radio Programmes Online, Supported by Infortrend’s RAID Storage

BoB (Box of Broadcasts) National Provides 2M TV and Radio Programmes Online, Supported by Infortrend’s RAID Storage

BoB (Box of Broadcasts) National is an innovative, shared online off-air TV and radio recording service provided by the British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC), for UK higher and further education institutions. It enables all staff and students in subscribing institutions to choose and record any broadcast programmes from 60+ TV and radio channels. On average, there are over 3,000 user sessions on the BoB platform a day.

The recorded programmes are kept indefinitely and added to a growing media archive (currently at over 2 million programmes), with all content shared by users across all subscribing institutions. To sustain the task of content download, upload, capture, edit and review, Infortrend’s EonStor DS RAID arrays have been chosen as the ideal storage platform. 

High Speed and Scalability

Specialising in providing educational access to television and radio programmes post-transmission, and with more than 60 years of experience, BUFVC understood the importance of BoB’s audio/video platform and storage hosting. For this project, BUFVC defined high speed file access for delivering files to end-users, fast write speeds for capturing broadcast data, and scalability for future expansion as the main requirements for the storage requirements. 

Proven Storage Technology - Infortrend EonStor DS Storage Systems

The secure video platform for BoB is provided by Cambridge Imaging Systems, who have been at the forefront of media asset management for over 20 years. They chose Infortrend's EonStor DS RAID systems for the BoB platform. Having proved itself on other high profile projects led by Cambridge Imaging Systems, EonStor DS was a clear choice.

The Video/Radio Platform Supported by Cambridge Imaging Systems

Imagen is a product of Cambridge Imaging Systems. It is an off the shelf end-to-end, secure video hosting platform for archiving and publishing media via a customisable website. Infortrend’s EonStor DS systems are perfectly aligned with Imagen to deliver a storage infrastructure that can support thousands of users simultaneously accessing data at any given moment. It also allows off-air content to be automatically repurposed for education without major administrative overheads – these are the most important values delivered by Infortrend solutions both for Cambridge Imaging Systems and for the BoB platform.