Indian Broadcaster New Delhi Television Ltd. (NDTV) has launched two new channels in India and the Middle East region using OmniBus' iTX.
NDTV Good Times, on-air since 7 September, was followed on 10 September, by NDTV Arabia, a channel aimed at expatriate Indian viewers in the Gulf.
NDTV, founded in 1988, is India's first and largest private producer of news, current affairs and entertainment television. NDTV operates NDTV 24x7, the market leading English news channel; NDTV India, a 24-hour Hindi news channel; and NDTV Profit, a 24-hour business channel.
"NDTV chose to use iTX for our new channels because of the comparative speed with which these channels could be brought to air", said NDTV's Group CTO, Rahul S. Deshpande. "iTX offers a self-contained environment with playout, storage, automation, logos and so on, all in one package, eliminating the issues with controlling multiple devices and managing different software versions, compatibility issues and software upgrades across multiple platforms. And because it is an IT file-based system, iTX integrates very readily with NDTV's existing content management procedures to provide a high degree of automation in the re-purposing and re-branding of content".
NDTV Good Times is NDTV's first foray into the very competitive Indian light entertainment market. NDTV Arabia will broadcast across the Middle East providing news and business programming based on content from NDTV Profit, NDTV India and NDTV 24x7. The output of NDTV Profit is cut live to air on Arabia while the other two channels are recorded and re-packaged for playout within half hour of transmission to domestic audiences.
NDTV's iTX system comprises two main on-air channels branded with master control, live playback and logos, and each of those channels has a cuts-only backup channel for redundancy. The solution was made up purely of OmniBus software running on 10 HP servers, with a Grass Valley Acapella router and Isilon storage.
iTX is software-based broadcast production and transmission solution that uses standard IT hardware and advanced software technology to provide all the functionality of a traditional broadcast playout chain integrated into a file-based environment and equally capable of linear broadcasting, IPTV streaming and VOD content generation.
