Al Mashhad TV is an Avid user
Al Mashhad TV is an Avid user
Leveraging an end-to-end Avid solution, Al Mashhad TV and Digital Platform built an entire broadcast operation from the ground up in 10 months. Operating from Dubai’s Studio City, the Arabic language station produces around seven hours of live broadcast per day, offering a mix of regular headline bulletin shows as well as high-profile segments in prime time.
The newsroom has a staff of nearly 40 people, supported by 15 correspondents spread across the region and worldwide. Utilising Avid systems, Al Mashhad’s workflows including ingest, editing, shared storage, story creation, rundown management, studio playout, media management and archiving. A crucial element is collaboration, with simplified, instant sharing of stories and media between team members powered by the solution.
The Avid news system has been implemented to enable staff to produce a constant stream of high-quality stories, particularly for breaking news and fast changing events. In addition to crafting shows in rundowns and writing stories, journalists can also directly access news wires from agencies, both local to the region and from international sources, which come into the Newsroom Management system automatically.
“Avid is known for being very stable, with fast turnaround workflows which are essential for news,” explained Kuppa Srinivas, head of technology for Al Mashhad “Avid has many ready-to-use functions that make it easy for users to react and create. It is that adaptability which helps our users.”
Providing the backbone of the live production environment is 800 terabytes of Avid NEXIS shared storage, with MediaCentral in place for collaborative editing workflows – either in the web-based MediaCentral Cloud UX, or in a high-powered craft editor. Incoming video feeds from remote locations or satellite trucks are available within seconds of starting, so journalists and editors can get to work quickly with the latest footage for their stories. This is handled by the ingest team using MediaCentral Capture to control up to 24 simultaneous ingest channels from three FastServe Ingest video servers. Producers work with iNEWS in the control room to output the show, with video playback from FastServe video servers controlled through MediaCentral Command.
In addition to the main system, which is hosted in a data centre within the news facility, Al Mashhad has a second system running in a data centre nearby for full solution redundancy if required. Using a defined workflow, selected media is automatically moved between the two sites to allow continuous operation in the event of a failure of the main system using a dedicated WAN link.
During the project, Avid’s professional services team worked with Al Mashhad to define a tailored training programme, ensuring that all staff were trained in a three-week period, enabling them to effectively prepare for going on-air.
Looking ahead, Srinivas said that the station is exploring ways in which AI and story-centric workflows can help expand efficiency. “AI functions such as speech-to-text and translation services to support Arabic languages, which are fully integrated into solutions, is required in a modern newsroom environment,” he concluded.
