The Indian broadcaster will be using Pebble Beach Systems’ automation solution to deliver its 24-hour news channel to viewers across the country
Doodarshan, an Indian public service broadcaster, has selected Pebble Beach Systems’ Marina automation solution to power its 24-hour news channel, DD News.
With more than 100 million viewers across the country, DD News produces over 17 hours of live transmission and 30 news bulletins in Hindi, English, Urdu and Sanskrit. Additionally, DD’s regional news units produce four daily regional shows, and the channel broadcasts daily sports bulletins, a business show, current affairs programmes and several special shows on health, youth issues, arts and culture, as well as international events.
The Marina system, which will be commissioned in the coming weeks, features a media object server (MOS) interface, and offers emergency ingest capability from a live feed. Supplied as a fully redundant system with automatic changeover, it is being installed to replace the Omnibus playout automation.
As an automation solution with embedded content management, Marina is equipped with the ability to evolve any playout infrastructure from legacy device control to incorporate new and evolving technologies. With Marina, not only is all metadata crucial to the description and playback of assets transferred, but an active database bridge is also created between the legacy system and the new one to keep them synchronised and enable them to run in parallel, said Pebble Beach.
Samir Isbaih, regional manager for the Middle East and South Asia, Pebble Beach System, said: “As legacy automation systems reach end-of-life, broadcasters want to take advantage of the flexibility and power of centralised, software-based automation systems. With Pebble’s automation systems, we are enabling our customers to put in place a painless, phased transition strategy that allows them to import legacy databases into Marina to ease the migration.”
