SGL

MANAgiNg SEAMlESS iNTEgRATioN oF CoNTENT TEChNology

SGL is a leading provider of content archive and storage management software for multiple business sectors including professional video, post-production, news, sports and government. A privately owned company, SGL is managed by the same three directors who founded the business in 1991. Its reliable, flexible content archive and storage management solutions are used by thousands of customers across the globe. SGL’s expertise stems from its experience creating solutions across a wide range of environments and from drawing on the most valuable resources available to the company -its expert teams, technology partners and customers. Innovation is key to progress and over the past two decades, SGL’s thoughtleadership has played a key role in defining, developing and integrating many new content management technologies in the industry.

A truly global organisation, the company is committed to meeting the needs of any customer, anywhere in the world. Its technical and development headquarters are located on the south coast of the UK with support based at its USA head office in Cincinnati, Ohio. In addition, SGL has sales and support offices across the USA, Europe and Asia.

SGL’s technology is built around its open system philosophy, which allows its content management solutions to work seamlessly in broadcast environments that consist of multiple systems and require interoperability between an array of standards and technologies. SGL is proud that its technology partners include

industry-leading companies representing every facet of the broadcast arena including media/ production, asset management, editing, video servers, automation, transmission, and disk/ tape/optical/cloud storage to ensure that its trusted flagship FlashNet archive software integrates seamlessly.

SGL has partnered with broadcasters and systems integrators in the Middle East for many years and is an established brand/ company in the region. The company’s FlashNet content management system is installed and is delivering efficient broadcast archives to leading facilities throughout the region including: AD Media, MBC, Qatar TV, Al Baghdadia, Al Aan, Al Kass and many others. Qatar TV in Doha, for example, uses SGL FlashNet as a key element of its digital workflow based around an Avid production environment in its state-of-the-art facility.

In 2016, SGL unveiled its new FlashNet Infinity dashboard. Providing broadcasters and content owners with an elegant interface that simplifies the management of media archives, Infinity delivers a sophisticated toolset for archive and restore functionality, system

Trevor Morecraft, EMEA Sales, SGL.

health, monitoring, analysis and more, and is available as a free upgrade to all SGL FlashNet users covered by a current support contract.

FlashNet Infinity provides smaller broadcasters that don’t have a MAM system with a set of management tools that allow

Bernie Walsh, Managing Director, SGL.

them to see what’s in the archive or stored on a certain disk so that they can archive material on the disk, or restore material in the archive, viewing a low-res copy on the FlashNet Infinity dashboard. The system takes a novel approach to the management of archived assets. While FlashNet itself is optimised for enterprise-level archiving, with the capability for automatic fail-over and for distributed processing of very high levels of activity, Infinity is designed specifically for high-performance search, monitoring and analysis.

The launch of FlashNet Infinity continues to validate SGL’s technical expertise. This was further recognised by Avid, who last year selected SGL as an Avid Alliance Partner and a key technology partner. Avid certification, available only to Avid Alliance Partners, is granted to third-parties that can prove a high technical standard and seamless integration within the Avid MediaCentral Platform. Avid and SGL have been strongly allied for many years and this highlights SGL’s dedication to providing open system architecture that delivers a fully accessible, high-quality content storage management system.

The industry has seen a sea change in its approach to archiving, with the archive moving much further forward in the production process to sit alongside ingest. SGL has been at the forefront of this change. With the successful take-up of LTFS, supported by SGL, broadcasters and content owners can benefit from true interoperability between what were once disparate systems. SGL’s Interplay Web Services Plug-in with Partial File Restore provides drag-and-drop archiving using Interplay watch folders without the need for Interplay | Archive. Powered by Glookast, the partial file restore functionality is a key feature as it enables editors to easily select and restore elements of a clip directly from the archive in high resolution. Prior to this, partial file restore functionality could only be achieved using the full Avid Interplay | Archive system. Partial File Restore powered by Glookast is a unique feature of SGL’s Avid Interplay Web Services solution. SGL’s support for Avid Interplay Web Services means that customers can use the archive capabilities that they currently require, but can employ Avid Interplay | Archive at any time in the future without the need to re-archive any content.

In 2016 SGL also launched its entrylevel archive FlashNet Lite. Featuring four configurations FL Disk, FL Tape, FL Hybrid and FL Optical Disk, the new software runs on a single server node and can grow as the customer’s archive expands. The software includes important FlashNet tools including integration with a wide range of partner solutions and storage devices, business storage rules and partial file restore.

SGL also closely cooperates with media cloud providers. The company supports Ci, Sony’s cloud-based service that allows media professionals to collaborate on the creation and sharing of high-quality, high resolution content. The SGL integration with Ci means that broadcasters and content owners can quickly and easily transfer material directly to the cloud from their MAM system using SGL FlashNet. As well as Ci, SGL also supports Amazon S3 via Aspera and ExpeDat Gateway.

SGL is also fully integrated with Sony’s Optical Disk archive System (ODS). The integration gives SGL users access to a greater choice of storage devices in DR, production, news and sports workflows. SGL FlashNet allows Sony’s ODS’s users to store valuable media safely with ease. This powerful combination opens up a world of workflow possibilities from disaster recovery solutions to management of archive material over disparate geographic areas. With SGL’s experience of managing multiple storage devices within production, news and sport, Sony’s ODS can sit anywhere within a workflow and not simply as an ‘end of process’ archive.

SGL has technical and commercial staff who are available to discuss solutions and projects at industry shows and events.

CoNTACT

Sgl

Unit 12, Fulcrum 2 Solent Way Whiteley PO15 7FN United Kingdom

Sales

Trevor Morecraft EMEA Sales Trevor.morecraft@sglbroadcast.com Tel: +44 (0) 1489 889930

Marketing

Nicola Wright Marketing Manager nicola.wright@sglbroadcast.com

Social Media

Website: www.sglbroadcast.com Twitter: @SGLBroadcast Linkedin: sgl Google+: +Sglbroadcast