GS Home Shopping Relies On StorNext For Hi-Res Workflow

GS Home Shopping is the leading multimedia retailer in Korea, and a global TV shopping powerhouse that provides home shopping across Thailand, Vietnam, China, Indonesia, Turkey, Malaysia and Russia. Video content to support the live programming is delivered on a huge number of digital platforms—broadcast and cable TV, Internet Protocol TV (IPTV), as well as smartphones and tablets.

A production workflow team of over 50 editors creates the content, provides captions in local languages, and delivers different versions to the supported platforms on a very tight time schedule, since the GSHS is constantly changing the products it offers based on consumer preferences. The original workflow, which was based on Apple Xsan, struggled to keep up with the tight time schedules, especially as files increased in size to support 4K and other hi-res formats.

Hi-Res Content Slows Down Production

The video content needed to be shared quickly by many different editors using different operating systems and editing tools. As file sizes increased, the system found itself overloaded: utilization rates above 90% were common, and workflow slowed to a crawl.

The GS Home Shopping team looked for a way to upgrade their storage infrastructure to provide higher performance, increased scalability, and collaboration across all their Windows, Linux, and Apple workstations, and compatibility with their existing Content Management System (CMS).

“GS Home Shopping carefully monitors consumer response to product offerings, makes rapid changes based on what we learn, and high-quality video content is essential to provide accurate information to consumers,” says Hyunwoo Kim, Manager of GS Home Shopping, Production 2 Team. “We have recently upgraded the entire broadcasting system—filming, production and editing—to support HDTV and 4K, and management of content has become critically important to us. When we looked for a storage solution, we looked at various criteria, including workflow efficiency, performance, price, system reliability, technical support, scalability and ease of use. The solution that we selected to meet our needs was StorNext.”

StorNext Speeds Up Workflow—Supports Existing Applications

The GS Home Shopping IT team added StorNext by deploying a preconfigured M440 Metadata Appliance. The new system provides a shared working environment that pools storage and servers and more than triples the amount of online storage. All the editors can now share content collaboratively over a high-performance Fibre Channel interface from Windows, Apple, and Linux editing stations, and delays in the workflow are a thing of the past.

The switch from Xsan to StorNext was seamless. All of the applications that the team depended on, including Adobe, Apple Autodesk, Avid, and Telestream, worked in the new system. The new StorNext environment also provides scalability for the future—allowing the team to easily add extra online capacity when data volumes demand it—and gives the team the option of adding an archive tier as well, with a choice of tape, object storage, or the cloud.

An Optimal Solution

“GS Home Shopping deployed Quantum’s StorNext to manage our broadcast video production workflow, and today more than 50 production team members securely store their content on StorNext and quickly access it for editing and re-use,” says Kim. “StorNext provides the high performance, stability and scalability which our workflow requires, making it easy to manage the huge file sets that hi-res production creates. StorNext created an optimal workflow solution for GS Home Shopping.”