Background
NEP Norway, operating from its broadcast center and headquarters in Oslo, stands at the forefront of innovation in the media industry. At the heart of their operations is broadcast production and delivery of streaming media and broadcasting services to the Norwegian market. The company’s expertise spans the entire production and distribution value chain, bringing its portfolio of over a 100 regional and international channels to a wide range of local audiences.
Business results
Enhanced storage performance
Cost-effective storage for content distribution
Increased control over media assets
Simplified operations and management
While the viewer count in the Nordic countries is lower than, for e.g., in the US, the expectations for quality and reliability are still the same. That means we always need to find ways of being cost-efficient, especially compared to bigger markets, while being able to deliver a high-quality service that our clients and their customers expect.
Eirik Nakken – Director of Technology at NEP Norway
In 2023, the NEP Norway team was setting up a new OTT streaming platform (on-demand media services delivered over the internet) for one of their clients. While they had a custom-built storage solution that needed to be renewed, they needed one that supported different storage systems, protocols, and vendors. The goal was to support clients in delivering dependable live streaming and 7-day catch-up services from a library consisting of around 40,000 media assets.
The Challenge
The proprietary storage solution that NEP Norway had been using reached end-of-life. Thus, while storage scale and capacity were never a problem, their existing system became a significant liability as the original vendor ceased development and support.
This scenario left the team facing several issues, including a lack of control and visibility over its storage environment. In particular, reporting on metrics like storage consumption proved complicated due to the limitations of the toolkit provided by the original vendor.
When the original vendor of our proprietary system ceased support, we were left with something of a black box. That left us at the mercy of an outdated user interface and toolkits.
Kenneth Øveråsen – Senior Streaming Engineer at NEP Norway
NEP Norway needed a solution that could accommodate two specific use cases. One was the video-on-demand (VOD) library, which is hosted on-premise. The library ingests a large number of media assets daily. While the volume of data being ingested by the system was fairly low, it had to be stored for the entire duration of the license window. The VOD library typically weighs in at around 350 TB. However, this can shrink or grow significantly, hence the need for a flexible storage infrastructure.
The team also uses their own media asset management (MAM) system, which needed to be interoperable with the underlying storage environment. However, while the MAM helps keep track of storage consumption and bandwidth usage, they also needed the option of manual access for deeper investigations and carrying out maintenance work. This involved using standard tools, such as file browsers and command line interfaces.
The second use case was the live 7-day catch-up window, which allows broadcast viewers to view content aired up to seven days earlier. This covers around 100 TV channels that are constantly writing their feeds, in 10-minute chunks, into the storage and keeping it for seven days. Given the ever-fluctuating content consumption habits of end users, factors like the number of read operations per second and bandwidth consumption are also very dynamic.
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