The National Basketball Association is betting that an innovative coupling of high-tech digital storage and more than 50 years of on-court action will net big dollars.
NBA Entertainment, based in Secaucus, N.J., and Silicon Graphics Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., have teamed up to digitally capture every jump shot, lay-up and block recorded by NBA cameras since the league began filming games, and later videotaping them, in the late 1940s. Since early this year the partners have also digitally captured the action of games and transferred it straight to an SGI data warehouse, bypassing videotape.
Thanks to a new archiving system created by SGI and the NBA, the league will soon be able to retrieve, edit and transmit on request even the most arcane action sequences since the recording of games began. Better yet for fans, the NBA plans to roll out that service across a range of media, including NBA TV and quick clips sent to PCs and cellphones around the world.
"Eventually, calling up almost any kind of action sequence will be as simple for average users as using an engine like Google to search the Internet," says Greg Estes, SGI's vice-president of corporate marketing. "Say you want to see Magic Johnson's three best career jump shots or his three best shots in any specific game. All you will do is enter a specific, simple request and the system will pull the shots from the archives, put them together and deliver them within seconds."
The service will greatly expand NBA revenue, says Steve Hellmuth, senior vice-president of operations and technology at NBA Entertainment.
"It allows us to be truly global," he says. "We will be able to instantly deliver, on request, historical or current action to countries anywhere in the world in any media format."
The NBA already delivers clips to Chinese television of action involving Chinese players.
"Say there are seven Serbians playing in the league," Mr. Estes says. "We can assemble all action shots from all games involving them and then send it to televisions, computers and even cellphone subscribers in Serbia."
Mr. Hellmuth adds: "This opens huge new markets and new products for us. Traditionally, the revenue base came from the price fans paid at the gate, broadcast rights, sponsorship and licensing. Now there seems to be no limit with what we can do with on-court action, past and present."
The first new service based on the system, which NBA Entertainment expects to launch this fall when an addition to its Secaucus headquarters is completed to permanently house the SGI data warehouse, is aimed at referees. It will allow them to instantly call up any action sequence in current or past games for review.
A similar service will be offered to coaches before the end of the year. At the same time, NBA TV will switch to the new digital archive to create the clips it broadcasts to subscribers.
The challenge in creating the new system was twofold. The NBA needed digital warehousing powerful enough to handle the massive amounts of data stored in both film and video archives and generated by each new game. The 30 NBA teams field 12 players a game for a season -- a total of 1,200 games, including a 71-game playoff series. It also needed a system that would allow simple and easy retrieval of any individual play or action.
NBA Entertainment approached several data warehouse developers, but found SGI offered the greatest capacity, Mr. Hellmuth says.
"Our servers appeal to very specialized markets like scientific research and engineering organizations," Mr. Estes says. "We also have considerable experience in feature films and broadcast. These are all areas where you have to be able to manipulate mountains of data with speed and accuracy."
Retrieval was solved by time-coding every game's action, a process the league started about seven years ago, Mr. Hellmuth says. League staff sits at the scorer's desk and records details of every player's involvement in every play, every shot and every basket. They note where on the court players are and rate each shot on a scale of one to five. Everything is linked to the official timekeeper's record of action.
This link between official time and action made it possible to create a retrieval system based on a wide format of options, including the performance of individual players and the difficulty of a shot.
The heart of the system is an SGIR InfiniteStorage NAS 2000, a refrigerator-sized rack with a small server built into it. The SGI equipment is linked to StorageTek storage units and the computers of 17 line editors, plus a non-line editing PC. It also has a system that automatically decides what medium is best suited to store specific material.
"If the data is to be used only every six months it gets stored on inexpensive tape," but the tradeoff is that retrieval is slower, Mr. Estes says. "If it is to be used more regularly, it gets stored on a more expensive medium right on the [server]"
"This is a huge leap forward," Mr. Hellmuth says. "We think what we are doing will transform [video use in]almost every other professional sport."