LCM Go Cloud Helps Antenna Cut Video Archive Retrieval from Days to Minutes with Amazon S3 Glacier

TV station Antenna’s 30-year archive of news footage, stored on tape at an offsite location, took days for the news department to retrieve for breaking news, so the company chose to migrate its archiving processes to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Staff can now retrieve archived footage 280 times faster than they could from tape. With the help of AWS Partner LCM Go Cloud, Antenna has optimized long-term archiving costs, removed manual tape handling, and freed up 50 TB from its local storage servers to increase the flexibility of its digital video library and bring agility to the fast-paced newsroom.

Antenna, a TV station known by locals in Cyprus as ANT1, has provided news and entertainment to residents of the island nation for 30 years. The company maintains a 140 TB library of digitized news video footage that its newsroom can quickly access for breaking news. Due to limited local network storage, it generally retains video files for only 30 days on the network and then transfers the files to tape cartridges for transport to offsite storage. Accessing footage from its 30-year archive was slow and cumbersome, taking up to 2 days to manually identify and retrieve the right archive box.

Antenna’s IT team also needed to manage spikes in demand for limited local storage capacity during major events like elections or political unrest. On average, Antenna digitizes about 350 GB of select video footage for its daily archive and uploads it to the local storage network. But during the February 2023 Cypriot presidential vote, its daily archive upload grew to as much as 2 TB, adding up to 14 TB or 10 percent of its digital library per week. At the same time, the news department wanted all election-related footage digitized immediately and available on local storage for up to 6 months, stretching capacity even more.

To stay ahead in the fast-paced broadcast news industry, Antenna needed a cost-optimized archiving solution that gave the newsroom not only faster access to archived footage caught on tape but access to more digitized video footage. “Elections generate 2 or 3 times more footage to archive than normal because of talk shows and debates,” says Michael Dallas, technical director at Antenna. “The biggest challenge during elections is that the news department doesn’t want to erase or archive footage—they want the footage online, available instantly, for 4 or 6 months.”

Antenna was researching which alternative solutions to its tape-based archives would offer the greatest flexibility, scalability, and opportunities for cost optimization. AWS Partner LCM Go Cloud approached Antenna’s IT department and presented it with a cloud-based solution with projected savings using Amazon S3 Glacier, long-term, secure, durable storage classes for data archiving at the lowest cost and milliseconds access.

Antenna had assessed the cost of copying locally stored video files to storage servers at a disaster recovery site. However, LCM Go Cloud’s proposed use of Amazon S3 Glacier and AWS Storage Gateway, which provides on-premises applications with access to virtually unlimited cloud storage, offered greater scalability, flexibility, and cost savings. “It was either save files on premises and send a copy to a different location, or try the cloud,” says Dallas. “When we asked what the most cost-effective was in the longer term, it was Amazon S3 Glacier.”

Antenna approved LCM Go Cloud’s final design that used AWS Storage Gateway as an interface between its local video storage servers and Amazon S3 Glacier. Following LCM Go Cloud’s advice, Antenna also used AWS Snowball, which accelerates moving offline data or remote storage to the cloud, immediately freeing up 50 TB of space on Antenna’s local storage network. Beginning in July 2023, Antenna began offloading older daily archives from local storage to Amazon S3 Glacier over a secure, encrypted connection. The solution gave Antenna control and flexibility, allowing it to gradually digitize its 30-year archive from tape and migrate it to Amazon S3 Glacier along with the expired daily archives.

The next major news event coming up for Antenna is the European Parliament elections in June 2024. Antenna’s archive department can now download video files from its archive in Amazon S3 Glacier in under 10 minutes—or just 0.3 percent of the time it could take to retrieve offsite tapes and up to 280 times faster than previously. Using AWS Snowball to migrate 50 TB of files from local storage to Amazon S3 Glacier freed up space that can now be used to support news department agility when news breaks. And Antenna no longer needs to transport cartridges to and from offsite storage, reducing security and data loss risks.

The scalability of Antenna’s archive in Amazon S3 Glacier has helped the IT and archive departments become faster and more responsive to newsroom requests for local storage and access to archived footage. “When the news department wants more footage available instantly, the cloud is going to help us because we won’t have to allocate extra storage for the news,” says Dallas. “With Glacier, we have scalability and flexibility, so we won’t have that bottleneck. Also, when the news department is doing a story about what happened 10 or 20 years ago, it’s much easier to find material quickly.”

Antenna has also simplified its storage management workflows by cutting out the need to select which files to transfer to cartridges and indexing them for the archive. Additionally, Antenna has a standardized process to digitize its 30-year archive of video footage still on tape and move it to Amazon S3 Glacier. “Instead of having to choose what footage to keep and then send it either to the online storage server or data cartridges, the last step is sending it through AWS Storage Gateway to Amazon S3 Glacier,” says Dallas.