Sinclair Broadcast Group, one of the largest television broadcast companies in America, is deploying Marquis Broadcast’s Analysis Parking software with a new enterprise monitoring dashboard for its many facilities across the United States. During its expansion, Sinclair Broadcast Group has always focused on optimising best practices for its news technology and operations. Part of this focus was to streamline and simplify the management and monitoring of multiple Avid NEXIS® systems, helping users manage Avid projects and valuable storage space more efficiently.
Paul Spinelli, director of engineering at Sinclair Broadcast Group, explains: “As a group, we’re continually evaluating new technologies that can realize further operational benefits and efficiencies. Our goal is to standardize technologies and workflows across all our Avid news operations, which now total over 60 sites. I started to investigate storage management and optimization tools and the Marquis Broadcast Parking family of products offered some real business benefits. The systems enable the recovery of large amounts of blocked-out – but usable – space and offers detailed enterprise-wide analytics on our Avid storage.”
Sinclair Broadcast initially deployed Marquis Broadcast’s Analysis Parking in three major sites. The software understands the relationships between Avid projects, folders, bins and media, and runs automated Avid NEXIS analytics and visualization processes, enabling each station to maximise the use of space on their Avid NEXIS storage systems.
“The results were frankly better than I had anticipated,” Spinelli continues. “We recovered significant amounts of Avid capacity within 24 hours of the first installation and, from that point forward, we’ve continued to operate automatically at over 90% storage efficiency. We have successfully deployed Marquis products in our news operations, and when legacy news operations have technical refreshes, we now deploy Marquis software as a standard component in the build.”
Sinclair Broadcast is also using Marquis Broadcast’s enterprise system monitoring dashboard, enabling its teams to see the status and condition of all NEXIS systems. This allows staff to see system trends and intervene quickly before any problems manifest themselves operationally.
Serena Harris, sales director for North America, Marquis Broadcast, added, “We’re delighted to support Sinclair’s continued expansion as part of a supply agreement via Chesapeake Systems.”