Case Study
Broadcast-to-Web Viewing Solution
Al Aan Television is a Dubai-based pan-Arab satellite broadcaster. Al Aan aims to address the needs and aspirations of a young, dynamic and modern Arabic female and family audience; to educate as well as to entertain. The service is available free-to-air on Nilesat and Arabsat.
Requirements:
The Al Aan website, has long been a successful part of the broadcaster’s offering, with the majority of news reports posted soon after airing. However, the process of getting reports onto the web was slow, labour-intensive and therefore costly. Each video clip had to be extracted manually, encoded for the web, tagged with the appropriate metadata from Newsroom Computer System Avid iNEWS, and then finally, pushed to the online video platform.
Solution:
Our team provided a costeffective Broadcast to Web solution, which automates the whole process of transferring broadcast content to the web, enabling better use of resources and improving speed to air, with video posted to the web within minutes of being aired. The solution is fully integrated with Al Aan’s Avid iNEWS system and the broadcaster’s content management system (CMS), to automatically capture, encode and export to the web all clips tagged in the iNEWS system.
Technical overview:
An actual broadcast video signal is fed into the “encoder server” which encodes it for the web. A metadata server segments the broadcast into news stories, extracts relevant metadata from iNEWS, creates the necessary package (thumbnail, etc.) and pushes the resulting video asset to the Web. The system is concise and simple, and for ease of management the servers are located at Al Aan’s facilities. Importantly, journalists are able to maintain control; only stories which have been pre-selected by them in iNEWS are pushed to the Web. This automatic solution enables avoid the risk of errors inherent in manual conversions and which would also speed up turnaround of news items.
Benefits:
The production process remains unchanged, allowing journalists to directly and easily select clips for the web
Maximizes the customer’s return on investment in its existing system infrastructure
Automating the process of transferring broadcast content to the web has reduced the web team’s daily load of repetitive tasks by around 50%.
Web editing team is now able to focus on improving the quality of content
Only a few minutes elapsing between a news story appearing on television and becoming available online
Al Aan’s website has become a key source of information across the region