Who is Jarrod Spiga?

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Jarrod Spiga01 April 2008, 4:00 AM

Profile

Jarrod Spiga is the Senior Infrastructure Engineer for Visionbytes, a company that develops and provides "workflow-based digital video and audio mining technologies and services".

What the hell does that mean?

In a nutshell, they capture video and audio from a number of different sources (including via satellite, cable, radio and high definition broadcast feeds or straight from digi-Beta tape, DVD and CD). This content is processed by a team of reporters who segment the media according to the client's request, provide metadata for the content (including the addition of transcripts and tags which assist in library catalogues, etc). Once processed, the content is then exported into various formats for delivery via the web, mobile, TV and IPTV. Notable clients include the Media Monitoring division of the Australian government's parliamentary library, NSW Parliament's Hansard, ABC, NineMSN, Yahoo!7, SBS, Southern Star, NASCAR, CBS and Al-Jazeera.

Jarrod's primary responsibility is the design and management of all the infrastructure that is used to provide these solutions. At the moment, this accounts for over 100 high-availability Windows and Linux servers located in offices and data centres in Sydney and Singapore (with a Los Angeles deployment occurring in the coming months) and associated network and storage infrastrutures.

When not at work or "enjoying" his 2.5-hour each-way commute, Jarrod spends way too much time sitting at his computers (well, according to his wife at any rate). In this spare time, he helps out in the running of a small hosting business, does the occasional bit of consulting work and writes for APC (after working with APC as a staff writer for two-years, Jarrod has continued writing for the magazine on a freelance basis over the past four years). When he can be dragged away from a PC, you'll most likely find him in the garage - tinkering with something - or lazing around watching a DVD.