Entertainment equipment maker Grass Valley is adopting Iomega's data backup REV drive for recording and playback.The Iomega REV Drive portable storage system is getting a new life as primary storage for a new line of recording and storage devices for the broadcasting industry.
Used primarily by small businesses for data backup and disaster recovery since its introduction in April 2004, the Iomega REV drive has now been adopted by Grass Valley, an analog and digital entertainment equipment manufacturer that is a strategic business unit of the Paris-based Thomson media and entertainment industry conglomerate.
Grass Valley said it plans to incorporate either the REV or REV Pro removable disk-based storage solution into several of its recording and playback products, including the Infinity Digital Media Camcorder and the Infinity Digital Recorder.
Grass Valley's products are typically used by television networks and other types of broadcasting outlets.
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Using disk-based storage in equipment designed for the broadcasting world is a fairly new idea, replacing the videotape that is standard in most cameras, editing decks and broadcasting servers.
Moving to disk will allow broadcasters to enjoy several benefits, including faster capture, editing and archiving of information, said Werner Heid, CEO of San Diego-based Iomega Corp.
"Tape is linear and tape transfer rates are relatively slow, so it can be pretty cumbersome to go through the entire digital workflow to capture, edit and archive information," he said.
"When a cameraman shoots a news conference, for example, he might do it on Sony BetaMax or BetaMax Digital and then put the tape on an editing deck. But before editing the information, he would have to copy it from the tape to a hard drive, which would allow him to do on-the-fly video editing."
The REV technology is also random access, allowing users to find the images or data they need quickly without unspooling tapes onto a host system. "Even if you have recorded 45 minutes at high density, you can jump 10 or 30 minutes, not by spooling forward on a tape, but just by jumping to the place you want to go," Heid said.
And because REV is based on hard drive technology, its transfer rates also are much higher, allowing users to capture video, edit the information, stream it through a server and move it to archive, all on the same media.
"We're fast enough that we can do editing and streaming at the same time," Heid said. "That's the key difference between us and tape."
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REV and REV Pro also can run multiple bit streams at the same time, allowing users to record on one end while editing on the other—a feature that is particularly important with live feed entering the system while an editor is trying to perform editing on the fly.
Iomega clearly hopes that REV will become the disk-based standard in broadcast-quality equipment.
While it's still early, the company has a good head start, said Robert Amatruda, research manager for tape and removable storage at IDC of Framingham, Mass.
"Old habits die hard, but there is a pretty big potential for REV," he said. "There are other unannounced products based on hard drive technology coming down the road, but Iomega clearly has a head start. They understand the ability to be fully and completely removable, and you can do that with a hard drive, while you can't do that with tape."
For now, Grass Valley is the only player in the professional content creation and distribution arena that is adopting Iomega's REV technology, and that could be the case for the long term.
"The way the contract has been written, as long as Grass Valley is penetrating the market and fulfilling certain minimums, they have some exclusivity in this broadcasting segment for quite a while," Heid said.
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