Case Study: Czech Television achieves faster, simplified, scalable UHD media production with DataDirect Networks' MEDIAScaler storage platform

Accelerating Concurrent Workloads for Escalating Media Broadcast and Production Demands

Czech Television, the Czech Republic’s public broadcaster, produces most of its programming in‑house—including UHD/4K content—and maintains an archive of tens of thousands of hours for on‑demand distribution. The shift to uncompressed 4K DPX and a surge in digital video strained legacy storage: file sizes and throughput needs soared, multiple teams (up to five concurrent workstations) required real‑time access for ingest, color correction and restoration, and the broadcaster needed a centralized, high‑performance, scalable solution to avoid bottlenecks and support 24/7 operations.

Czech TV deployed DDN MEDIAScaler, a scale‑out/scale‑up parallel file‑system appliance (SFA + IBM Spectrum Scale) delivered over 40GbE with SMB/NFS access and one petabyte of raw capacity. The turnkey install (completed in under two weeks) consolidated ingest, editing, restoration, transcoding and finalization while integrating with Baselight, Diamant and Clipster. Results: sustained real‑time 4K performance for multiple simultaneous users, on‑demand capacity and performance growth, lower TCO by replacing FC SAN, and a future‑proof platform ready for 8K and software‑defined networking.

Czech Television

Jaroslav Sladek

Video Department Chief