NBC purchased a Media Archive Enterprise Media Management technology platform during the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, because it is an off-the-shelf suite of products that can be deployed very quickly. This temporary facility in Salt Lake City was NBC's 3rd largest production operation.

During the Winter Games NBC received sixty feeds from an army of remote, mobile units as well as twenty host feeds produced independently by the Salt Lake Olympics Organizing Committee (SLOC). In previous Olympics, NBC has deployed a custom-built media recording, logging and database system (OPIS) to ease the workflow for show producers and editors. But the system is limited to text-based SQL database query that merely directs users to the shelf location of recorded material. With the massive, frenzied scramble for resources typical during an event of this magnitude, inevitable choke points arise based on the availability of VTR's and disk recorder ports. This year, some feeds were logged into Media Archive twenty hours a day for seventeen days, providing 3,400 hours of online MPEG-1 video proxy to production-quality material. While some input feeds captured air feeds, others were selected according to spot needs and 'hot' items, such as competition finals. Historically these feeds tie up multiple capture resources at the same time. By buying time through early content access in this resource intensive environment producers were offered the richest choice of story content yet enabled during Olympics broadcast coverage.

During the seventeen days of Olympics coverage, NBC evaluated how best to integrate OPIS with Media Archive to leverage the years of effort built into the OPIS database management and it's metadata schemes with the strengths offered by a multi-functional MAM platform. Several migration options are available because of open standards inherent in both systems and because of the wonders of XML and SOAP content exchange technologies.

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