* Streaming media from the Museum of Broadcast Communications made possible by unique storage technology from Cleversafe
The Museum of Broadcast Communications has a vast archive of classic television and radio shows. The museum uses unique storage technology to store the content and deliver it smoothly over the Internet on demand. Distributed storage from Cleversafe helps to keep the Golden Age of Television alive.
Are you a fan of old radio and television shows? Do you appreciate the historical value of original news reels of speeches by John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Martin Luther King, Jr.? If you’re tired of the endless drivel on YouTube, then why not listen to or view real history on www.museum.tv?
This fascinating Web site is brought to you by the Museum of Broadcast Communications. The streaming media is made possible by unique storage technology from Cleversafe, Inc. I’ll tell you how it works in just a moment.
Bruce DuMont is the president and founder of the museum. DuMont spent much of his career as a television producer. One day at work he discovered a treasure trove of newsreels and tapes of broadcasts of great historical value. They had been cast aside like old newspapers. DuMont decided to rescue these and other broadcasts and put them in a museum.
Over the years he built up a repository of more than 80,000 hours of radio and television content, mostly in analog form. He wanted to make the content available in a contemporary format, so he started to encode it digital format. At the same time, the Internet was evolving, and it was now possible to stream media content worldwide. DuMont’s dream of making available all of his radio and TV broadcasts to a vast audience looked like a reality.
The museum’s first attempt at streaming the content was a victim of its own success. As more users attempted to use the site, the quality of the streaming deteriorated, resulting in many complaints from users. The museum took the content offline until a solution could be found.
One of the disappointed users happened to be Chris Gladwin, president and CEO of the dispersed storage technology company Cleversafe. Gladwin contacted DuMont and offered a solution that seems to be a perfect fit. (Read my previous article about how Cleversafe technology works.)
Unlike conventional storage that holds the stored content on an array of mechanical disk drives, Cleversafe stores small slices of representations of the data on a dispersed grid called the Dispersed Storage Network (dsNet). When it comes time to retrieve the content – in this case, the radio or television shows – the slices are put back together and presented to the media server faster than data could be read from disk. The result is smooth video delivery streamed broadly over the Internet.
Here’s a quick look at the three main components of a dsNet.
* CS Slicestor (Dispersed Storage server) – This is a device where data slices are stored. A typical configuration would have multiple Slicestors. They can be deployed in a single rack or geographically distributed around the world.
* CS Accesser (Dispersed Storage router) – This component slices, disperses and retrieves data to and from the Slicestors. It holds the “secret sauce” – the algorithm that converts raw data to the representative packets called slices. It has iSCSI or Block interfaces, and can be deployed in redundant configurations.
* CS Manager (Dispersed Storage network manager) – This out-of-band Manager monitors Accessers and Slicestors, and through standard protocols can report into a Network Operations process. It provides dsNet management and reporting.
For the museum configuration, each piece of digital content – a TV or radio clip – is run through the Accesser, which slices the information to create representations of the original data. One video may be represented by hundreds or thousands of small slices, which are then distributed across the grid network and out to eight different Slicestors in four locations.
When a visitor to the museum Web site asks to view a video, the Accesser pulls the appropriate slices off the Slicestors and reconstitutes the frames of the video in real time. The frames are passed to the media server (in this case a Windows Media Server) and streamed over the Internet to the waiting user. It’s faster to retrieve the slices and reconstitute the data in real time than to redirect regular video data from a hard drive.The slices contain additional information that allows recreation of the original data 100%, even if some of the slices are unavailable, say from a network or hardware failure. If a slice goes missing or becomes corrupt, it can be automatically rebuilt using the other slices. This rebuilding process goes on in the background, with the Manager component checking on the status of all the slices to continually ensure high availability.
Gladwin has been working with the museum on this project since October 2008. So far the team has been able make about 7,000 assets available online. Gladwin calls this “phase one,” where they demonstrate that the Cleversafe technology positively does work. “Phase two” will come later when they deploy an even more dispersed network. He also envisions the day when the functionality of the Accesser is built into a media server, increasing performance even further.
See for yourself how smooth the video is. Go to www.museum.tv, register for a free account and pull up a classic show. You’d never know that tiny slices of the video are zinging across the dsNet and coming together at just the right instant to bring you your show.
