Optical Disc Archive at Jyske Bank
Perhaps unique among banking institutions and certainly among the first brands anywhere, Denmark’s Jyske Bank (pronounced You-ska) has pioneered a communications strategy powered almost exclusively by video.
Company background
The bank has produced daily video content for its own web TV channel since 2006. Content is designed to communicate a variety of public relations and marketing messages with its customers and a wider audience. Video is also used internally to distribute corporate messages, training and information. Every week a live programme, Inside Live, is available to view by every employee. The core of the network is Jyskebank.tv, described as the go-to, interactive source for all those who wish to be informed on the latest financial happenings. It is a TV news channel delivering up-to-the-minute information on financial markets and breaking economic news.
The company refers to itself as both a bank and a media company and has won several awards for its approach. Its permanent broadcast team of 15 produces financial programming, in Danish and English languages, as well as compelling stories that the bank believes are relevant to its core audience of younger consumers and small enterprises. These include interviews with media personalities, footballers and even philosophers.
The bank houses a cutting-edge file-based TV studios located in the Danish city of Silkeborg and manages a string of correspondents filing live reports from locations worldwide including from the NASDAQ in New York’s Times Square.
Every piece of content the company shares is embeddable or shareable on other sites. Because of this, 80 percent of Jyske’s content is viewed, not on its website or owned channels, but rather on outside sources, according to the company. This has helped it attract media partners from Mobile World Congress to the Cannes Lions.
We'd been looking for solutions for several years until we found the right one in Sony.
Steen Mertz
Director, Communications Technology, Jyske Bank
Jyske Bank's requirements
Content has been produced digitally since 2006 and stored on Jyskebank.tv’s internal Avid Interplay online system. Around three years ago the bank realised it needed a longer term solution to archive more than 6000 programmes and began investigating the options.
Steen Mertz, Director of Communications Technology explains: “We have a lot of content stored on the Avid Interplay system and we decided to begin to move that into some other form of archive. In the long term we felt that the Interplay storage system would prove an expensive way to store content. A lot of the content is not in daily use so it was becoming a more and more expensive solution to grow the archive.
“We need to have some kind of record of what we’ve been doing but also we needed access to the archive so that we can pick and choose clips from previous productions. Keeping it all online however was neither economic nor a sensible use of storage space on the server.
“We’d been looking for solutions for several years until we found the right one in Sony.” Jyske Bank first tried a tape solution in a test phase for its future archive. “Even though we have significant amounts of content, compared to a national broadcaster we have a relatively small amount so for a data tape archive to have worked for us economically we would have had to purchase a large system.”
Why Sony was selected
“We always make a point of searching the market at trade shows and we have a good relationship with Sony in Denmark,” says Mertz. “A year ago we also standardised on Sony SxS file-based media, switching from P2, and investing in PMW-500 camcorders to record content.”
“We felt that Sony was offering a more advanced set of technologies in keeping with the current and future direction of Jyske Bank,” he adds. “In addition we felt that the Sony Optical Disc Archive solution was more elegant (than data tape solutions) in its ability to access and retrieve content.”
The Sony solution
Jyske Bank invested in an Optical Disc Archive PetaSite ODS-L30M 30-slot master library unit. The unit holds two ODS-D77F Optical Disc Archive fibre drives, 30 cartridges, and a built-in robotic mechanism in a 7U, 19-inch rack-mountable chassis. The ODS-L30M forms the basis of the PetaSite Optical Disc Archive. A total of five extension units can attach to the ODS-L30M to make up a single 42U library offering a maximum 535 cartridges (802 TB), depending on the extension units used.
The total archive solution is managed by Sony’s File Manager application. With five network clients, this provides a flexible, cost-effective and efficient method of archiving valuable assets for the long term, with minimal user involvement.
The Sony Optical Disc Archive system is ideal for deep archive where data tape does not provide the assurance or meet the need for write-once, very long-term archive requirements. It provides second copy archive at a remote site and is ideal for business continuity/disaster recovery, post house and production back-up and for video, film and stock footage archives or national archives. The system can also be used for news and sports clips that need to be near-online and as an on-line browse and proxy clip store.
Optical Disc Archive is very easy to use and a relatively inexpensive solution for us. With 30 Optical Disc Archive cartridges in the PetaSite library at any one time this perfectly fits our requirements.
“Optical Disc Archive is very easy to use,” explains Mertz. “The economics of our archive means Optical Disc Archive is a relatively inexpensive solution for us and it gives us some great possibilities of retrieving the content again. With 30 Optical Disc Archive cartridges in the PetaSite library at any one time this perfectly fits our requirements.”
The migration of content from the Optical Disc Archive began at the start of the summer 2014 and is nearing completion. Since the archive dated back eight years and included a mix of SD and HD content, a team was employed to not only manage that process but incorporate a quality control check on the content on ingest into Optical Disc Archive.
