Egyptian Radio and Television Union (ERTU) Selects Aveco

Aveco, the worldwide broadcast facility content management and automation solutions specialist, has installed two ASTRA Content Management and Automation systems at two separate sites for the Egyptian Radio and Television Union (ERTU): Studio 5 and Newsroom for news production and playout. The ASTRA CMS Content Management System manages eight production control rooms for ingest, transcoding, and file transfers within the facility and 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 over 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 enabling metadata exchange between ASTRA and Quantel databases as well as the importing of clips from 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.

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.