In Broadcast - February 2015 - 56

56

www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 5 - Issue 2 | February 2015

InStudio

Broadcast Systems Integration - Part I cont'd...
Dega Broadcast Systems
While it was a good year for the
company itself, at Dega Broadcast
Systems, Director John Cleaver tends
to judge the buoyancy of the industry
as a whole by the number of available
freelancers. "That seemed to remain
reasonably high for most of the year,
indicating that 2014 was generally
pretty flat," he says.
The rest of Dega's year-end report
sees demand mainly coming from
the UK, a new entrant in the shape
of IP-only broadcasters, and no real
significant shift from capex to opex.
"I think it is fair to say that the
approvals are now often based on
guaranteed requirements rather than
long term speculation, but it is not
easy to provide a complete technical
facility without a good deal of capital
investment," he says. "We have
often made allowances for lease or
rental equipment within installations,
although we have not been involved
in complete facility leasing and it is
unlikely to be something that we would
be able to offer."
Probably the company's highest

profile project of the year was helping
BBC Sport provide facilities for their
coverage of the Commonwealth Games
in Glasgow.
"One of the headaches was passing
70 HD feeds across the Clyde between
the International Broadcast Centre and
the BBC Production Centre," he says.
Two sets of fibres were encased in
protective conduits laid across the bed
of the river - plus a line of sight link to
provide an emergency feed.
A Riedel Mediornet was used as
the multiplex carrying 56 feeds over
and 14 returns as well as four duplex
MADIs, 24 discreet audios and four
network links. These were carried
on two sets of eight duplex cores
giving dual redundancy and dynamic
allocation of bandwidth across the
fibre cores.
"The dependency of the whole
coverage on this system meant that
resilience was built into every aspect
of the solution and a considerable
amount of proving and pre-testing
was carried out. The final result was
an error free operation and a very
efficient installation."

Dega Broadcast Systems helped BBC Sport with
the Commonwealth Games infrastructure

For 2015 Cleaver predicts a quiet
year as the ripples of the global
economic slowdown continue to
spread through the system.
"The manufacturers are all keen
to persuade us that IP is ready to
replace SDI, though few of them have
any real substance to their claims.
Most of them are hedging their bets
and waiting to see what formats the
industry will adopt. It is without doubt
inevitable that it will happen and while
transport is now practical, routing is
becoming more realistic, processing

in a production environment is still
a little way off so broadcasters are
asking themselves what advantages
they are gaining by investing in IP now.
"The uptake of 4K may be a key
factor because existing infrastructure
will not cope adequately with that,
but the main driving force appears to
be centralising technology for remote
operations and that in turn could see
a complete change to the whole OB
market."
See: Broadcast Systems Integration
- Part II next month.

Avid Streamlines News
At Channel 9
C

hannel 9 is one of Israel's leading
free-to-air
Russian-language
broadcasters, writes Alon Raif, Chief
Operations and Engineering Officer,
Channel 9.
We're also known as Israel Plus, and
provide our Russian-speaking viewers
in Israel and North America with news
from our state-of-the-art studio in Tel
Aviv.

Recognising that viewers no longer
stick to scheduled news broadcasts
and instead demand news content
anytime, anywhere and on any device,
we embraced Avid Everywhere and
selected the Avid MediaCentral
Platform to power our workflow.
We're quickly reaping the benefits
of being on the platform and have
streamlined and accelerated our news
production operations, in turn
broadening our global reach
and boosting our revenue.
With a workflow comprising
a host of proven and trusted
solutions from the Avid
Artist Suite, Media Suite, and
Storage Suite - all running

Avid's AirSpeed 5000 video server handles the news content

on the MediaCentral Platform - our
new workflow enables us to easily
share content with our Israeli partner
stations, Channel 2 and Channel
10. As both of these channels are
already powered by Avid workflows, it
means we're able to repurpose assets
from their archives, and vice versa,
giving all three stations the ability
to collaboratively create, access and
distribute content from everywhere -
something which just wasn't possible
before we adopted the platform.
A vital piece of our workflow, and
one that handles the hundreds of
hours we receive daily, is the Avid
AirSpeed 5000 video server from the
Avid Storage Suite.
To manage, play out and repurpose
our news content quickly, we needed
an ingest system that would integrate
with our storage and production
asset management systems. After
consultation with Avid Professional
Services and Draco, who carried out
the design, integration, installation
and project management, we found
Avid AirSpeed 5000 to be the perfect

ingest solution for our demanding
news production environment.
The
interoperability
between
AirSpeed 5000, ISIS, and Interplay
production asset management means
the process of bringing news to air
is significantly faster, enabling us
to increase our content production
and widen distribution of our news
programming. As a result, we have
seen increased viewership.
Having our new Tel Aviv facility
based around the Avid MediaCentral
Platform, with an AirSpeed 5000 video
server as the backbone of our ingest
enables us to expand our footprint
among Russian-speaking audiences
beyond our current territories, which
is bringing a wealth of new revenue
opportunities.
Currently Chief Operations & Engineering
Officer at Channel 9, Alon Raif
was previously Director/Editor
at Keshet TV.
Prior to that, he worked
for Channel 10 Israel as
Head of Media IT
and Video Editor.
http://www.inbroadcast.com http://www.dega.co.uk/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=8pTex5BtN9g&x-yt-cl=85114404&x-yt-ts=1422579428
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