Omneon, Inc., today announced that the Japan Racing Association (JRA) has selected the company’s Spectrum™ HD media server system to provide ingest and playout for its broadcasts of thoroughbred horse-racing programs and information to racetracks and off-track betting facilities. The Spectrum system installation, integrated by Ikegami Tsushinki Co., Ltd., of Tokyo, is part of a transition now underway at JRA to an all-HD environment.

“In making the jump to HD, JRA wanted to use only best-of-breed systems that would provide seamless interoperation now and in the future,” said Yahiro Nakagawa, broadcast system subsection chief at Ikegami Tsushinki Co., Ltd. “They were impressed with the Spectrum system’s reputation for reliability, as well as the flexibility afforded by its open architecture design. They also liked the modular character of the Spectrum system, which will enable JRA to make its transition to HD without any significant disruption of the services that racing fans depend on.”
 
JRA has installed Spectrum systems at each of its two broadcast centers, located in the Kanto and Kansai areas. Each provides about 270 hours (6.7TB) of storage, with six channels of MPEG-2 HD ingest and 18 channels of playout at 50 Mb/s. At JRA, the racetracks’ live content is delivered to the centers, ingested to Spectrum Servers, and transmitted by asynchronous transfer mode.

Besides the races themselves, JRA has broadcast continually updated and thoroughgoing coverage of every aspect of the “sport of kings,” including odds and background information on the horses and jockeys, to 52 locations in Japan since 1984. The Spectrum system will go on air June 21.

About Omneon
Omneon is a leading provider of flexible media server and active storage systems that optimize workflow productivity and on-air reliability for the production, distribution, and management of digital media. Omneon is a pioneer in the use of advanced IT technologies and open systems for broadcast applications, producing a modular and expandable video server architecture in the Omneon Spectrum. The company's MediaGrid active storage system delivers centralized content storage that is scalable in capacity, bandwidth, and media-processing power. The company has an extensive global presence with customers in 45 countries on six continents. Omneon is on the Web at www.Omneon.com.

About the Japan Racing Association
The Japan Racing Association is a public company established to operate Chuo Keiba and to manage racecourses, betting facilities, and horse-training facilities. It was founded in 1954, according to the Horse Racing Law and the Japan Racing Association Law and is operated under the strict oversight of the Japanese government. .

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