Gold Medal Storage: Seagate to provide nearly half a million gigabytes of storage for NBC’s 2008 Olympic Games Coverage

The Seagate Barracuda ES Series has been selected as the hard drive of choice for the Omneon MediaDeck™ media servers and MediaGrid™ active storage systems that will enable NBC’s coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, to be held August 8-24. The media servers and storage systems will allow NBC to produce an unprecedented 3,600 hours of coverage during the Beijing Olympic Games – a three-fold increase over the coverage during the 2004 Athens Olympic Games.

Picture this: A gymnast leaps onto the balance beam. By the time she makes a dismount, NBC’s broadcast footage has already been stored on the Seagate Barracuda ES hard drive in Omneon’s Beijing MediaGrid active storage system, traveled 6,350 miles to the New York MediaGrid active storage system, processed, and quickly transmitted as compelling coverage on television and www.nbcolympics.com.

The innovative workflow begins in China with 20 MediaDeck servers, powered by the Barracuda ES hard drives, which are used to digitize and ingest HD feeds. Each MediaDeck server contains both high-resolution and low-resolution codecs to simultaneously create both full-resolution IMX or XDCAM HD files and low-resolution proxy files of all recordings. The resulting files are actively transferred, while still being recorded, to the MediaGrid active storage system. Then, using Omneon’s ProCast CDN content distribution system, the proxies are transferred thousands of miles from the MediaGrid active storage

system in Beijing to a second MediaGrid storage system in New York, again powered by Seagate Barracuda ES hard drives, where producers can browse, view, and edit the files.

“NBC needs to capture every second of every competition at multiple venues in China, quickly turning them into dynamic programming for television and Internet broadcasting – nothing can fall through the cracks,” said Bill Schilling, marketing director at Seagate. “We welcomed the opportunity to work with Omneon to support NBC for its Olympics coverage. Omneon is the market leader for developing storage solutions for broadcast video, which is becoming more prevalent via the Web, especially for hugely popular sporting events like the Olympics.”

“Because the workflow must be seamless and the nature of the programming is so significant, we decided to use Seagate’s enterprise hard drives, which are the best fit for our needs in terms of reliability, best-in-class design and unrivaled performance,” said Geoff Stedman, SVP products and markets at Omneon.

Broadcast coverage of the Beijing Olympics will begin on August 8 along with coverage via the web at www.nbcolympics.com

About Seagate

Seagate is the worldwide leader in the design, manufacture and marketing of hard disc drives and storage solutions, providing products for a wide-range of applications, including Enterprise, Desktop, Mobile Computing, Consumer Electronics and Branded Solutions. Seagate’s business model leverages technology leadership and world-class manufacturing to deliver industry-leading innovation and quality to its global customers, with the goal of being the time-to-market leader in all markets in which it participates. The company is committed to providing award-winning products, customer support and reliability to meet the world’s growing demand for information storage. Seagate can be found around the globe and at http://www.seagate.com.

About NBC Olympics

NBC, “America’s Olympic Network,” owns the exclusive U.S. media rights to the Olympic Games, television’s most powerful property, through 2012, which includes Beijing in 2008, Vancouver in 2010 and London in 2012. From August 8-24, 2008 NBC Universal will present an unprecedented 3,600 hours of coverage, highlighted by NBC in primetime with live swimming, gymnastics and beach volleyball. In August 2004, 203 million viewers watched as the networks of NBC Universal—NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, USA, Bravo, Telemundo, and NBC’s HD affiliates—offered a then record 1,210 hours of Olympic coverage from Athens. For additional information, go to NBCOlympics.com, a year-round destination for fans of Olympic sports, featuring news, Beijing previews, athlete features, expert blogs,