Object Matrix has announced that it has supplied 1 Petabyte of MatrixStore to the new and ‘in demand’ 24/7 News channel in South Africa.
Praised for its fresh innovation of broadcast news in South Africa, Newzroom Afrika provides high-quality News bulletins that are entertaining, informative and educational. With a demanding schedule of live feed via the in-house studios and remote contribution and delivering 24/7 playout to DStv, Newzroom Afrika had an urgent need to address its storage requirements for both near-line and archive workflows.
Newzroom Afrika required a storage platform that could be utilised for several purposes, but most importantly was able to securely manage, protect and give access to content created at all times. The platform needed to seamlessly integrate with their Avid based newsroom environment to enable simple movement of assets from online to near-line. The platform also needed to integrate to the chosen Asset Management system to provide a secure archive environment to finished content.
As MatrixStore is a highly secure multi-tenancy platform, that is non-proprietary, tightly integrated to many third-party platforms and has been deployed and proven in similar workflows across the world, it was the logical 
choice. With the ability to grow/scale as the business requires whilst offering the future proof flexibility Newzroom Afrika required, MatrixStore delivered a transparent value proposition.
MatrixStore is the multiple award-winning, media-focused solution that is designed to meet the challenges faced by media organisations that log, share and archive video content. It’s tight integrations and automated workflows guarantee that Newzroom Afrika has greater flexibility, more content protection and wider sharing options.
Jayosh George, HOD Technical Operations at Newzroom Afrika commented: “As our archive continues to grow, it is becoming increasingly apparent that we needed to better preserve that content whilst making it instantly accessible. MatrixStore was an attractive solution for us as it is a non-proprietary, extremely versatile and built for multiple media workflows and it offers everything we were looking for in a secure yet accessible archive platform”
MediaCloud Networks, a trusted partner and advocate of Object Matrix, assisted Newzroom Afrika with implementing the solution that meets their ever-increasing demands for reliable and accessible storage. As a certified partner in South Africa who also offer a cloud-based storage service based on MatrixStore, Mediacloud were able to showcase the benefits of deploying ‘the most in demand object storage platform’ in the market.
Peter Watling at Object Matrix added: “The team at Newzroom Afrika is highly skilled and has already achieved rapid success. Having MatrixStore as a nearline and archive platform enables Newzroom Afrika to easily and securely manage its assets for the future, scale as the business demands and introduce further workflows. Newzroom Afrika shares the same dedication, passion and ethos as us at Object Matrix.”
The solution consists of 1PB MatrixStore object storage with access to content provided by standard interfaces, Interconnect (for Avid Interplay) and the Vision application to visualise their archived assets. The cluster will be installed in a single location in the facility in Johannesburg.