Egyptian Radio and Television Union (ERTU)’s Studio 5 and Newsroom have put into service two ASTRA content management and automation systems at separate sites for news production and playout.
The ASTRA CMS content management system, installed by Aveco, manages eight production control rooms for ingest, transcoding and file transfers between the two sites.
Newsroom is ERTU's main production facility and is based on Quantel production and playout servers. A distributed ASTRA Orbiter system manages more than 80 Quantel channels in eight production control rooms to develop content for playout and distribution.
ASTRA also provides a media asset management layer above Quantel for ingest, redundant playout, file import/export, transcoding, archive control and media exchange. Tight integration of content and metadata between ASTRA and Quantel is achieved through the native Quantel CORBA interface, which enables metadata exchange between ASTRA and Quantel databases as well as the importing of clips from news agencies, such as Reuters, EBU and APTN, with full metadata preservation. ASTRA News receives the rundown from ENPS to automate the playout of content to multiple sites, such as Nile International, Nile News and Nile TV.
Studio 5 uses ASTRA Ingest to ingest video and other media files. ASTRA MCR and ASTRA News are used to playout “Nile News,” a 24-hour news channel, from EVS video servers. Production is done on a number of Apple Final Cut Pro systems using placeholders from ASTRA News.
Both sites are integrated with ASTRA components and are able to exchange media as well as control commands via a high-speed Internet connection. ASTRA CMS moves clips between Quantel production systems and EVS playout video servers, automatically transcoding the Quantel AVCi 50 format into Apple Pro-Res format for playout on their EVS systems.
Each site has full redundancy with mirrored ASTRA servers. Additional layers of redundancy are achieved via mirrored playout channels with automatic failover.
