NCAA Archive: Then & Now

Presented by:Nate Flannery - Director of Championships and Alliances,

Digital and Social Media, NCAABret Wilhoite – VP of Sports Operations, T3Media

July 25, 2013

State of the NCAA Archive - 2005• Over 33,000 assets that were:

Wide variety of physical formats:

o Film

o 1 inch

o 3 / 4

o VHS

o Beta SP

o Digibeta

o HD Cam

Single physical copy of most assets

Older assets were poorly labeled

Climate controlled for an office, not video storage

• Access limited the speed of dubbing and a UPS shipment

Cost of Developing a Digital Archive was Prohibitive

• NCAA received a quote for $2MM annually for digitization and storage

• Still need internal staffing to support access for schools, broadcasters and internal departments

• Further development of R&D capabilities were needed to effectively utilize digital archive

• While critical, the digital archive couldn’t be only about preservation

Digitization & Licensing

• In 2005, T3Media, then known as Thought Equity, digitized the archive and developed the archive’s rights value

Significantly reduced the $2MM fee for the NCAA

Provided upside from licensing royalties

Web access to search, preview and delivery for key stakeholders

No additional R&D expense for the NCAA

Digitizing Was Initially A Brute Force Exercise• Multiple digitization stations with full-time staffing

Initially Grass Valley machines, but quickly moved to Mac with Final Cut based methodology

Encoded assets at an acceptable broadcast format depending on the type of originating physical media, majority of assets at DV50 or higher

o Film shipped to LA, cleaned and scanned in HD, subsequently stored in a facility rated for 500 years

Confirmation of asset metadata at a baseline of 15 facets for search/retrieval: game, schools, round, date, footage type, sport, gender, etc.

• Transferred onto external hard drives & shipped to T3Media

• Ingested into T3Media’s platform

Duplicate digital copy created and stored at a separate location

• Access via web based search, preview & delivery for NCAA stakeholders

Access Drives Demand• Digital archive and the

corresponding web based access

Increased licensing of archive significantly, providing the NCAA with additional revenue

Allowed for faster development of additional content uses (i.e., DVD Store, online officiating review, Vault, etc.)

Increased needs of the schools

• NCAA’s needs for content increased to the extent that Internet bandwidth became a constraint

Returning the Archive• To overcome the new found constraints inherent with a digital, web based

archive T3Media delivered a copy archive back to the NCAA through LTO and LTFS while leveraging the web based access for search and preview

• LTFS/LTO enables the NCAA to access master-quality copies of assets in Indianapolis

• Interoperability: LTFS allows disparate IT departments to collaborate on large scale tape storage infrastructures.

• Accessibility: Media companies get the dual benefits of a cloud-based, DR, offsite storage solution with local access to support production and other time-sensitive use cases

• Speed: No need to copy “off” one tape and onto another due to cross-enterprise file system complexity and incompatibility

• Cost Savings & Efficiency: the LTFS open standards provide cost savings and operational efficiency as compared to licensing and managing proprietary archive software

• Rather than having a warehouse of tapes, the NCAA has a bookcase with its digital archive