Turner Network, Inphase, Hitachi Maxell Make History On First Play-Out-To-Air From Holographic System

InPhase Technologies announced that Turner Network Television became the first television network to air content originating on holographic storage.

On Friday, October 21, 2005 engineers from InPhase Technologies and Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. ingested a promotional advertisement into InPhase’s Tapestry holographic disk as a data file. The ad was recorded by InPhase’s holographic prototype drive onto the holographic disk, which was manufactured by Hitachi Maxell, an InPhase partner and investor. The file was then electronically migrated to a server and played back to air at the scheduled time. This promotional ad will remain active in the system and will be aired whenever called for by the program schedule of TNT.

“This was done to investigate the feasibility of using holographic storage for broadcasting television content,” Ron Tarasoff, vice president of broadcast technology and engineering at Turner Entertainment Networks. “This is an ideal way to store high-quality, high-definition movies because the extremely large capacity of holographic disks enables us to store TV programming as files, and the data rate allows us to migrate files on and off the disks quickly.”

Hitachi Maxell and InPhase will hold Japan’s first public demonstration of holographic storage at the International Broadcast Equipment Exhibition (InterBEE) on November 16-18,2005 in Tokyo.

The Tapestry holographic system can store more than 26 hours of broadcast-quality high-definition video on a single 300 gigabyte (GB) disk, recorded at a 160 megabit per second (Mb/s) data rate.

We believe the capacity and data rates of holographic storage will be critical to achieving the breakthrough improvements in work flow and cost reduction that the broadcast industry is seeking,” said Nelson Diaz, CEO of InPhase Technologies.

Customer shipments of the 300 GB InPhase Tapestry product will commence in 2006, representing the initial offering in the family of InPhase holographic drives and media, which have capacities ranging up to 1.6 terabytes (TB) and data rates of 960 Mb/s.

Source: InPhase Technologies