Hard drive manufacturer Seagate announced this week that it will be providing storage for NBC's 2008 Olympic Games coverage--a fairly tall order. The company will be providing around half a million gigabytes of storage for the network's coverage, set to occur between August 8 and 24.

NBC's coverage of the Beijing games will amount to around 3,600 hours--around three times the duration of their 2004 Athens coverage. Everything will be stored on Seagate's Barracuda ES hard drives, which are backing up the network's Omneon MediaDeckmedia servers and MediaGridactive storage systems.

"NBC needs to capture every second of every competition at multiple venues in China, quickly turning them into dynamic programming for television and Internet broadcasting--nothing can fall through the cracks," said Seagate's marketing director, Bill Schilling. "We welcomed the opportunity to work with Omneon to support NBC for its Olympics coverage. Omneon is the market leader for developing storage solutions for broadcast video, which is becoming more prevalent via the Web, especially for hugely popular sporting events like the Olympics."