From Days to Minutes: 280× Faster
Video Archive Retrieval with AWS
Antenna (ANT1) has been broadcasting news, entertainment, and local programming to Cyprus since 1993. Its newsroom maintains a 140 TB digital video library, but due to limited local storage, footage is only kept online for 30 days before being transferred to tape cartridges and shipped to an offsite location. Retrieving anything from the 30-year archive took up to 2 days — a critical bottleneck in a fast-paced newsroom.
The problem peaked during major news events. In the February 2023 Cypriot presidential election, daily archive uploads surged from 350 GB to as much as 2 TB per day — adding up to 14 TB per week. At the same time, the news department demanded that all election footage remain instantly accessible online for up to 6 months, pushing local storage to its limits.
"Elections generate 2 or 3 times more footage than normal," said Michael Dallas, Technical Director at Antenna. "The biggest challenge is that the news department doesn't want to erase or archive footage — they want it online, available instantly, for 4 or 6 months."
LCM Go Cloud approached Antenna's IT team with a cloud-based solution centred on Amazon S3 Glacier — long-term, secure, durable archival storage at the lowest cost with milliseconds access. When Antenna evaluated the alternatives, including replicating files to a second on-premises disaster recovery site, the answer was clear: "When we asked what the most cost-effective was in the longer term, it was Amazon S3 Glacier."
LCM Go Cloud designed an architecture using AWS Storage Gateway as a seamless bridge between Antenna's local video servers and Amazon S3 Glacier. AWS Snowball was then deployed to immediately migrate 50 TB of older footage off local storage — freeing up space for the newsroom without a single file being lost. From July 2023, daily archives began flowing automatically to S3 Glacier over a secure, encrypted connection.
The result: archived footage that once took up to 2 days to retrieve from tape can now be downloaded in under 10 minutes — a 280× improvement. Antenna also has a standardised path to digitise its entire 30-year tape archive and move it permanently to the cloud.
With Glacier, we have scalability and flexibility — we won't have that bottleneck. When the news department is doing a story about what happened 10 or 20 years ago, it's much easier to find material quickly.
LCM Go Cloud replaced Antenna's tape-based offsite archive with a lean, fully managed AWS stack — delivering 280× faster retrieval, elastic scalability, and simplified storage workflows.
Read the official AWS Partner Success Story or get in touch with our team to discuss how we can modernise your media archive and storage infrastructure.
