In Broadcast - July 2014 - 66

I N T E R N A T I O N A L

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 33 - JULY 2014

N E W S

InMEDIA

IT Revolution: Beware The Talking Dog!
By Simen Frostad
Chairman of Bridge Technologies

R

66

evolutions - even the most
benign ones - are almost
always followed by a period of
over-reaction to the régime that
preceded them.
It would be an exaggeration
to say that in broadcasting the
transition from dedicated black-box
equipment to IT was a revolution:
a paradigm shift would be a better
description, but it has brought a
pendulum swing in its wake just
the same. There is now a tendency
to think that everything IT is
good, and to neglect the value of
dedicated hardware.
This tendency has led to overzealous attempts to create
server-based solutions for every
conceivable application in
broadcasting and media delivery,
and some of these attempts ﬂy in
the face of logic and good sense.
In theory, a server is a generalist
platform that can do anything if the
right software is running on it. But
in reality there's a bit of the 'talking
dog' syndrome here - people get
excited not so much by how well

the dog talks, but by the fact that it
can talk at all.
Standard IT servers and software
are simply not the best way to
do everything.
IT platforms, cloud computing
solutions and virtualisation are
brilliant tools for some tasks, and
give the media industry a way to
get out of the narrow restrictions
inherent in a black-box hardware
model, and to link seamlessly into
a data-rich world.
Nothing can beat the potential
for heavyweight data processing,
formatting and presentation
offered by a huge server farm. But
this potential is intoxicating and
it has led to some spectacularly
ill-conceived initiatives in the
media industry: for example, the
championing of IT and ﬁle-based
IP as a complete replacement for
SDI, which overlooked broadcasters'
quite justiﬁable affection for frameaccuracy as a foundation of
what they do.
Seeing past the dogma
demanding that everything old

In broadcast centres IT technology is rife, but is it always the best solution?

should be abandoned in favour
of the latest new thing, some
manufacturers have been far more
canny about rendering unto Caesar
what is Caesar's.
Let data centres and IT do what
they do best, these manufacturers
say, and use clever, super-efﬁcient
compact dedicated hardware
to complement the cloudcomputing power.
The key to unlocking the full
potential of IT and cloud computing
is to combine it with smart, energyefﬁcient, robust edge devices which
do their job far better than any

server/software solution ever could.
In monitoring, lightweight, smallfootprint hardware probes at
strategic points in the distribution
network are a set-and-forget
way to gather accurate data and
analytics which is then collated and
processed in vast bulk by server
systems and data centres.
It's not good sense or good
economy to build this processing
power into the hardware probe,
and it's not good sense to deploy
a server where a lean, purpose-built
probe can perform far better.

Africa 24 News Channel On Air With Stingray CiaB
A

utomation,
content
management and integrated
channel specialist, Pebble Beach
Systems, recently announced that
Africa 24, the ﬁrst pan-African news
channel, has installed the Stingray
Channel-in-a-Box (CiaB) solution at
its Paris transmission centre.
Africa 24 is a 24-hours-a-day,
seven-days-a-week television news
network which aims to provide
editorially independent, balanced
and realistic coverage of the
African continent.
As the most watched French-

language African channel, it
broadcasts to a core audience of
viewers from Sub-Saharan Africa,
and is also available via satellite to
subscribers in the Middle East, North
Africa and beyond. The network was
launched in 2009 and expansion
plans include offering further
language variants including English,
Arabic, Spanish and Portuguese.
Stingray leverages Pebble Beach
Systems' best of breed automation
and integrated channel technology
to deliver a full HD ingest and
playout channel-in-a-box solution

Africa 24 is running on Pebble Beach Systems Stingray CiaB

for systems of up to six channels.
In addition to hosting clip-based
channels, it is designed to handle
complex reactive channels featuring
live content, late-breaking changes
and dynamic schedules. Thanks to
its client-server architecture, multiple
channels can be controlled from a
single operator position, and user
privileges and access to speciﬁc
functionality can be set on a per
channel basis.
Africa 24's single channel fully
redundant Stingray system was
supplied by Pebble Beach Systems'
partner in France, Soft4TV, and
was installed in May, with operator
training completed early in June. It
integrates into the broadcaster's
existing technical infrastructure,
offering automatic media movement
from the current media SAN.
Stingray's native 2D Flash graphics
playout capability is deployed
to deliver graphics which are
dynamically updated when breaking
stories arrive, and Stingray's audio
and DVE functionality are used
to generate transitions between
news segments.
Yacine Barro, the Executive

Director of Africa24, said: "When
the service providers for our backup
channel moved location, we elected
to migrate the management of both
main and backup channels to our
own technology in-house.
"We are a new broadcaster and are
still growing, so a key priority was
to ﬁnd a solution that could evolve
with us. We evaluated all the big
name channel-in-a-box solutions,
and Stingray was the most open
and scalable, offering the greatest
potential to add more channels and
language variants.
"Of course, Pebble Beach Systems'
excellent reputation and great
references were also a factor."
Pebble Beach Systems Managing
Director Peter Hajittoﬁ commented:
"Stingray is based on proven 64bit architecture and leverages our
best-of-breed Marina enterprise
automation and Dolphin integrated
channel device, so Africa 24's mix
of live and clip-based programming,
with frequent late-breaking changes
to the schedule, really plays to the
strengths of this channel-in-abox solution."
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