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BY SARAH MILSTEIN
PHOTOS: JOHN TROHA
Streaming Media on a Digital Island
SONY ELECTRONICS CREATES A STATE-OF-THE-FUTURE BROADCAST PRODUCTION
CENTER FOR DIGITAL ISLAND TECHNOLOGY
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Calm. People are working at terminals in all corners of Digital
Island's New York offices, and construction
is underway down the hall. Movies are being
shown, without sound, on large, plasma monitors
that hang above the workstations, and pop
music plays in the background. But with all
the sensory distraction, the atmosphere in
this data services company's sleek space is
calm.
Digital Island staff and executives
say it hasn't always been like this, and the
serenity is largely thanks to a broadcast
production center designed and installed by
Sony Electronics. Completed in May, the center
allows Digital Island to efficiently acquire,
encode, and deliver streaming media signals
online over its private distributed network.
So when Sun Microsystems webcasts an investor-relations
call, or Reuters sends out video clips of
news over its web site, or Clear Channel broadcasts
a pay-per-view O-Town concert on the Internet,
it all gets handled by Digital Island-and
it's done with a minimum of movement and anxiety.
"Before, I would
get a tape, put it in the deck and run over to
the encoder. Then I'd have to run back to the
deck and check the levels. Then I was back at
the encoder. Then I was checking cables. And
so on," says Richard Spiegel, Director of
Encoding Services for Digital Island. "Now,
it's two clicks of the mouse, and somebody
sitting at the encoding station saying, 'Okay,
it worked.'"
THE CHALLENGE
 Digital
Island provides 2Way Web Services(tm) that
include a portfolio of infrastructure services
including managed hosting, content delivery,
and network services that enable enterprises
to transact profitable e-business with their
customers. The company, headquartered in
San Francisco, has three primary types of
customers: large enterprise businesses like
JP Morgan Chase, and American Express; entertainment
media concerns like Reuters, Bloomberg Television
and Universal Music Group; and high technology
companies like Microsoft, Cisco, Intel,
Compaq, Sun Microsystems, and others.
For broadcasts, Digital Island receives
audio and video signals via satellite, fiber,
or any type of tape, and over IP. The company
then encodes the signals to be supplied as
streaming media and sends them out over its
network. All of this is unseen by the end
user. In fact, most of it is unseen by the
client companies, and that's how they want
it. "Our customers overwhelmingly don't
want to know what equipment is enabling their
broadcast," says Adam Cohen, Chief Media
Officer for Digital Island.
But last year, the company found
itself working too hard to troubleshoot individual
broadcasts, and it anticipated that its equipment
wouldn't allow it to grow as needed. "Lack
of ability to scale and high-level quality
control were our primary concerns," says
Spiegel. To get where Digital Island wanted
to go, "we needed someone who understood
every aspect of video engineering, integration,
and implementation," says Spiegel.
THE SOLUTION
 Digital
Island looked at a number of companies'
systems before accepting Sony Electronics'
proposal for two broadcast production centers,
a large one in New York, and a slightly
smaller one in Los Angeles, which was completed
in August.
Cohen
explains, "Having evaluated solutions that
were out there from a technology standpoint
and from a pure hardware-cost-quality
standpoint, we very quickly landed on Sony
broadcast equipment as a standard for our
broadcast production centers." Digital
Island will use the New York center as a
model for future facilities around the
globe. Sony provided what Bob St. John,
a Sony Senior Sales Engineer who was involved
in the deal, describes as "a wide range
of creative and technical capabilities for
virtually any type of streaming project."
The equipment backing up that claim includes
digital Betacam(r) and DVCAM(r) videotape
recorders, a DFS-700 switcher and multi-effects
box, a DMXR-100 audio board ("better
than what most post-production centers have,"
says St. John), encoders, decoders, and a
MAV-555 digital disc recorder that enables
simultaneous record and playback for multiple
feeds.
Beyond the hardware, Cohen cites
responsiveness, experience, and sensibility
as the key points that sold him on Sony. In
particular, the end-to-end nature of Sony's
proposal was attractive. "That's very
much in line with our value proposition,"
says Cohen. "The ability to take responsibility
for an entire application really resonates
with our customers and of course it resonates
with our vendor selection."
 Sony
sees it similarly. St. John explains, "We
were able to take the pressure off them
and say, 'Guys, let us come in and deliver
a turnkey system from drawings to training
to final sign-off.' We managed the project
and did everything for them." That
included working with Anystream, the company
that supplies encoding technologies to Digital
Island, and integrating their products.
Indeed, Digital Island execs say
Sony exceeded their expectations, particularly
in displaying an unusual tolerance for change.
"Sony was extremely flexible with us
in swapping out decks and other items,"
says Cohen. "Even after sign-off they
made sure that what we landed with was what
we could actually use."
Spiegel adds, "I made several
changes throughout the process and Sony was
very flexible in meeting our needs. For example,
I told our project manager that an encoding
station needed to be put in a specific place,
and he had all his cables custom cut for that
location. Then the location needed to change,
so he jumped in and reconfigured the cables
without saying a single word about it. They
just did what was necessary."
While such flexibility ought to be
expected in any service deal, it is not the
norm, says Cohen. "That is not a typical
scenario in any of our vendor relationships.
Sony really stood out as a shining example
of a true working relationship on this project,"
says Cohen. In addition, Cohen and Spiegel
were pleased that Sony completed its work,
even with the changes, within the agreed upon
budget.
The two Digital Island execs also
note that although they signed off on the
completed deal months ago, the project manager
still stops by to tweak things. "Mike
Young really cared about doing this right,"
says Spiegel. "If we were doing a live
event on a Wednesday at midnight, he'd come
in to make sure the technical and ergonomic
flow were smooth." Cohen adds, "They've
delivered what we ordered and paid for. At
this point, to be receiving the same kind
of attention is extremely impressive to me."
THE RESULTS
"The puzzle came together on
a Sunday afternoon when we switched over from
our old equipment to our new equipment, and
everything worked exactly the way it was supposed
to," recalls Spiegel. "We were holding
our breath, and then everybody's eyes kind
of lit up like, 'This is too good to be true!'"
So what have they got? First, the
operations room looks really cool. There are
racks of sleek equipment, carefully arranged,
that blink and hum in the air-conditioned
space. To the untrained eye, it's a handsome
arrangement of electronics. To the trained
eye, it's confidence inspiring. "When
we do a facility tour with a client who knows
what they're looking at," says Spiegel,
"there's a 'wow' factor."
But of course, the production broadcast
center isn't just a good-looking design. With
lots of power under the hood, it allows Digital
Island to deliver its customers' streaming
media with a high degree of reliability. "There's
increased uptime," stresses Cohen. "Which
is not to say the audio/video quality hasn't
improved. It has. But remember that we're
taking broadcast-quality signals and knocking
them down to sub-VHS quality to be able to
deliver them over the Internet." So what's
more important to Digital Island, he says,
is that dependability in the company's output
"has enabled us to drive more business
with our customers."
Spiegel puts it succinctly: "Now
we don't hold our breath when we get five
events simultaneously." He recalls that
on a recent Thursday afternoon, he received
an e-mail asking if he could stream video
from the Burning Man festival in Nevada three
nights later. It was no problem. "We
can put together an event really quickly.
In the past, it's taken more time to set up
all the equipment," he says. "But
someone could come up to me right now and
say, 'Here's what it's going to be, here are
the satellite coordinates.' And essentially,
we could be ready to go in two hours. If we
really had to push it, we could do it in an
hour."
The ability to handle a high volume
of streaming media traffic is critical because over
the summer, Digital Island was acquired by
Cable & Wireless, an England-based global
provider of Internet services. As a wholly
owned subsidiary of Cable & Wireless,
Digital Island will leverage the company's
industry-leading global IP backbone and manage
the combined hosting facilities of Cable &
Wireless to offer an enhanced, more robust
portfolio of web infrastructure services.
The deal means Digital Island now has approximately
one-million-square feet of combined data center
space and an industry-leading private backbone
reaching 70 countries, up from 35 countries
just a few months ago.
Cohen is sanguine about the jump,
however. "Scale is just not a problem
I have today," he says. Indeed, with
intense media coverage of the World Trade
Center tragedy and the heavy Internet traffic
that week, the system was tested-and it passed
easily. "We experienced more volume across
the board," says Spiegel, "and we
scaled perfectly."
While Digital Island is now prepared
for multiple advanced events that could crop
up at a moment's notice, its day-to-day operations
are running more smoothly, too. "Perhaps
our biggest success story is Reuters,"
says Spiegel. "We've gone from requiring
six people, 24/7, doing very manual-intensive
work, to one person just monitoring a screen.
We're also turning signals around faster,
far exceeding our contractual obligation to
them."
 Although
the Sony system is sophisticated and a few
Digital Island staffers thought it might
be difficult to learn their way around it,
there is now universal agreement about its
straightforwardness. 'We were surprised
at how easy it was to use," says James
Guevarra, Manager of Encoding Services.
"You hear about it, you see the diagrams-everyone
was a bit apprehensive. We did the transition
and held our breath, but all of a sudden
we were using it. It was like, 'Wow, that's
it.' Now it's very simple." Since the
Sony system was installed, the encoding
department has reduced its staff by ten
percent, estimates Spiegel. And it accomplishes
the same amount of work with less time and
effort. In fact, Spiegel says, given the
capacity and reliability of the equipment,
"the general stress level in the office
is down."
Moreover, with a dream facility in
place, the production staff can concentrate
on improving the broadcast signals and making
the events as compelling as possible. Cohen
raves, "It's just wonderful to be focused
more on customers and business than on infrastructure."
In the end, it all comes down to
confidence. Producer Matthew Elefant points
out, "If you were to walk into this room
now, we could be doing a three-camera feed
of a live event to 100,000 people, and you
wouldn't really know it. It used to be that
when we did an event it was everybody on deck.
We have complete confidence now." No
wonder the office is so calm.
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