DID YOU KNOW...?
In the 1960s, the BBC wiped the original video tape recordings of Doctor Who.
The reason was simple: Storage was expensive and limited. The BBC needed the tapes for new programs.
Ever since, tape has been used to store the vast amounts of data in video creation, production and playout. There are three main reasons for that:
- Tape is considered being cheap.
- Moving a tape from A to B is the fastest way to transfer data.
- Capacity is just a matter of adding more tapes.
Unfortunately, tape storage also requires making compromises, especially in terms of:
- Speed and availability, due to its linear data structure and the lack of random access,
- Protection against losing data, since one tape holds one instance, and
- Complexity, which created a big business for media asset management.
An ideal system for video storage would be fast, secure, scalable, flexible - and still competitive in terms of incremental cost and TCO.
