NETIA Radio-Assist Selected by Radio Sultanate of Oman to Automate Operations and Digitize National Audio Archives

Installed at Muscat and Salalah Stations, Complete Radio-Assist System Automates Ingest, Production, Scheduling, Playout, and Archiving

CLARET, France -- Oct. 7, 2014 -- NETIA today announced that the Radio Sultanate of Oman is using the Radio-Assist(TM) suite of digital audio software programs at radio stations in Muscat and Salalah to provide complete automation of operations and to support digitization and preservation of the national archives. The custom Radio-Assist implementations, which will run both in English and Arabic, will provide secure digitization of the broadcaster's audio archives, currently stored on a collection of 80,000 tapes.

"The robust capabilities of Radio-Assist not only facilitate more streamlined operations at our two broadcast stations, but also provide needed flexibility and reliability as we undertake archiving of treasured historical content," said Ahmed Al Balushi, director of radio studios at the Radio Sultanate of Oman. "The modular design of NETIA's software suite has allowed us to implement a solution tailored to our needs, and it will enable future adaption of the system as our broadcast and archiving workflows evolve."

"We worked closely with our systems integrator, Bahwan IT, and the Radio Sultanate of Oman to engineer a stable, secure, and reliable solution for preserving the valuable audio assets and for making that media readily available for future broadcast or distribution," said Philippe Fort, CEO at NETIA. "As the stations in Muscat and Salalah continue to build their archives through Radio-Assist, they can do so with confidence in the long-term integrity and availability of those assets."

Radio-Assist 8 is equipped with a broad range of tools for end-to-end multimedia workflows, and the Muscat and Salalah stations leverage the system to streamline their ingest, production, music scheduling, playout, and archiving operations. Radio-Assist 8 extracts data from a legacy automation system and from newly created or digitized media to make stored media readily available to users. The NETIA system provides fast access to all audio content, which in turn can be accessed remotely for listening at a low bit rate and subsequently restored at full quality for repurposing and distribution or for broadcast.

Further, NETIA's solution will ensure the stability of the archived content, synchronizing the Muscat and Salalah archives automatically, and thus providing transparent redundancy and automatic archives restoration in the event of any incident. Each site will act as a disaster recovery site for the other, and any audio digitized at one site will be automatically stored at the other. Secure remote access to the Radio-Assist 8 database will also give the two sites the option of exchanging content.

More information about NETIA and its products is available at www.netia.com.

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About NETIA

NETIA, a Globecast company and part of Orange, is a leading provider of software solutions that enable efficient management and delivery of audiovisual content to today's full array of media platforms. Relied on by more than 15,000 users in 200 installations in more than 40 countries, NETIA solutions allow content producers and owners to manage content from ingest to delivery, targeting multiplatform outlets including the Internet, VOD, IPTV services, and mobile devices.

NETIA provides radio automation, media asset, and workflow management solutions to major radio and television brands and to multimedia groups around the world. Clients include The Associated Press, ABC News Radio Network, WestwoodOne, Radio Globo in Brazil, RTM in Malaysia, SBS and ABC in Australia, MediaCorp Singapore, RAI Italy, RTL France, Radio France, RTBF in Belgium, and France Televisions. NETIA has its headquarters in France, with offices in the United States, Paris, Rome, Moscow, and Singapore, in addition to a global network of professional distribution partners.

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