The Farm has launched a storage service for finished programmes that it believes will help production companies with the shift to file-based delivery.

The post firm’s Spots service (Single Programme on the Shelf) has been designed to act as a replacement for a production company’s clone tape and the other elements that made up a ‘shelf archive’, and put an end to the practice of storing finished programmes on removable drives.

As an alternative to charging a production company to make a clone of a delivery tape, the Farm will store a one-hour programme for three years for a fee of £500.

At the end of the three-year period, companies will be asked if they want to keep the programme in storage or remove it.

The Farm joint managing director David Klafkowski said: “The driver for this is [incoming Digital Production Partnership delivery spec] AS-11. AS-11 should be treated as a transmission deliverable, not an editable archive.

“This is the answer to production companies’ questions about what to do when they move to 100% file-based delivery. Putting a programme on spinning disk is not a solution, and providing producers with HD Cam SR tapes is not a solution with any longevity.”

The highest possible editable version of a programme, preferably as a flattened or consolidated NLE sequence, together with finished audio stems, graphics packages, a high-quality viewing version and information such as photosensitive epilepsy and AQC reports, will be stored locally.

A copy will reside in “deeper” storage, potentially Microsoft Azure or Amazon’s cloud service.

The Spots data pipeline is based on Rhozet ProMedia file-based transcoder software. Transcoding queues and housekeeping are managed by Rhozet WFS and in-house web services.