Beginning with the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)/Radio-Canada undertook a bold, innovative approach to the coverage of live events with a new remote production model designed to dramatically reduce production costs. Instead of deploying production facilities and staff on-site the event, CBC deployed high speed networks and the latest technologies in compression and video serving to transmit raw video feeds to its studios in Montreal and Toronto for local editing and broadcast. By dramatically reduces the resources needed on-site, the remote event production model reduced production costs manifold.

However this promising new approach for remote event production could not be realized for a file-based workflow using conventional file transfer technologies. In order to move high-resolution video files at near real time from remote production sites back to Canada, a file transfer speed of tens of megabits per second was required. Yet WAN file transfer speeds using conventional technologies such as FTP and the native Avid Transfer Manager are severely limited by the poor performance of TCP for long-distance and high-bandwidth networks, and one to two orders of magnitude slower than real time. After a detailed review of Aspera's transfer technology, CBC invited Aspera to build a high-speed transfer solution around the Aspera products that would meet the performance requirement, and enable file-based production specifically for the Torino Olympics and for future remote events.

“ We relied on the Aspera solution throughout the Torino games and were delighted at the full integration with our Avid workflow. High-speed transfer capability is essential for file-based remote event production, and we intend to deploy our Aspera solution in support of future events, such as the Beijing Summer Olympics in 2008. ”

Antony Duboyce, Senior Manager of CBC

The integrated solution was required to transfer video files at near real-time speeds, with no performance degradation, regardless of the network latency from the remote location. The solution had to provide automatic bandwidth sharing, adjusting the target transfer rate to protect other network traffic, and allowing multiple high-speed transfers to run with stability. In addition, the solution had to be fully bi-directional, to allow content exchange between crews at local and remote locations for continuous work around the clock. Most important, the solution had to seamlessly fit into the desktop video editors and CBC's end-to-end Avid workflow.

To meet these requirements, Aspera developed a plug-in for the Avid Transfer Manager enabling users of Avid editing applications to transfer individual clips and entire Avid bins using Aspera's high speed transfer engine seamlessly, from within the Avid application. The Aspera plug-in at the destination Avid workgroup automatically checks in the transferred content to the Avid Media Manager, preserving the native Avid workflow from the user's perspective.

After a successful pilot deployment for the World Athletics Event in August 2005, CBC deployed the Aspera Plug-in for the Avid Transfer Manager and the Aspera Scp core on six systems for the 2006 Torino Olympics. From within the Avid Media Composer, editors in Sestriere, Torino, Toronto and Montreal used the Aspera menu option to transfer several gigabytes of video per day between these locations throughout the two-week event. Transfers often ran concurrently, and in both directions, to and from Italy, sometimes in the presence of other network traffic. Using Aspera's adaptive rate control, CBC's administrators set a maximum transfer rate of 30 Mbps, which the Aspera transfers would ramp up to achieve when the network was idle, and a minimum rate of 10-15 Mbps to guarantee a minimum transfer speed on a busy network. Two concurrent Aspera transfers shared half of the available bandwidth, and when other traffic was heavy, backed down to protect the other traffic.

The net results were transfer speeds 10-45X faster than file transfers using the native Transfer Manager, depending on the available bandwidth. Most important, the transfer speeds were able to keep pace with the encoding rate of the video allowing for near real-time transfers, an achievement simply not possible with conventional transfer technologies. Antony Duboyce, CBC Senior Manager, Systems Development and Integration in CBC Technology, said, "We relied on the Aspera solution throughout the Torino games and were delighted at the full integration with our Avid workflow. High-speed transfer capability is essential for file-based remote event production, and we intend to deploy our Aspera solution in support of future events, such as the Beijing Summer Olympics in 2008."