HONG KONG and LOUISVILLE, Colo., State-owned China Central Television (CCTV) has chosen StorageTek(R) Storage Technology Corp., the storage services and solutions expert, to provide digital storage solutions for CCTV and its News Sharing System. "We are pleased to participate in CCTV's News Sharing System," said Brian Knott, StorageTek regional director, North Asia. "CCTV is spearheading the adoption of digital media asset archive storage in the broadcasting industry in Asia Pacific, and will set a standard for other regional TV stations in deploying automated tape library solutions. Because of our StorageTek archive storage solutions, we are part of the historic CCTV team that is ramping up the development of China's television broadcasting industry. "Our solution features the most advanced tape technology available and delivers high-performance, efficiency and availability. From this solid foundation, CCTV can address its current storage challenges and meet its future storage requirements as the size of its news archive continues to grow," said Knott. The 2008 Olympics, to be held in Beijing, will accelerate the deployment of digital television and the adoption of digital media asset archive storage in China. As China's state-owned television, CCTV is taking the lead to fully digitize its program content for more effective data storage and management. Launched in June 2001, CCTV News Sharing System captures, stores, preserves, manages news content and enables the sharing of archived content among its five broadcast channels. After careful research, evaluation and trial testing of a number of possible solutions and products in the market, CCTV selected the StorageTek Nearline(R) storage solution to power its News Sharing System, including the StorageTek PowderHorn(R) 9310, the world's largest automated tape library, and T9840 and T9940 Fibre Channel tape drives. Established since 1958, CCTV has a large amount of video content, in particular news content, the most valuable CCTV asset. The traditional analog storage format, with its shortcomings in storage duration, image quality and media management, no longer met CCTV's requirements. To remain competitive in the fast-changing China TV market and to ensure that the video content is used in the most efficient and economical way, CCTV was looking for an effective video archive solution. The StorageTek digital archive storage solution allows CCTV to run various applications, greatly protects CCTV's storage investment, and fully meets CCTV's need for high-speed access to archived data files for producing and editing its news content.