News, Newsno |

19 giugno 2018

CASE STUDY : Hosanna Vision (Panama)

First half of 2018 has been very productive for SI Media. Several installations have been deployed around the world and many will come in the second semester as well. Among the projects we have completed in this period, one of the most significant has been Hosanna Vision in Panama.

Hosanna Vision is a Christian Television Channel, a benchmark for all the Caribbean for its infrastructure and the quality of its contents. Hosanna Vision chose SI Media as unique provider of traffic and automation system for its main channel.

All the servers have been installed, configured and shipped from Italy including storage and library, and this has optimized at best the deployment time in Panama. In less than 6 weeks the installation has been completed, staff trained and the channel officially launched on air.

Which are the peculiarities of this installation for SI Media?

First of all, SI Media has taken care also of the system integration, providing a fully redundant network infrastructure based on Aruba, dealing with its installation, configuration, cabling and testing.

1) In terms of workflow, SI Media provided an end-to-end solution, including:

-4 ingest channels to generate contents from satellites, studio and vtr

-file ingest from drop folders, P2\XDCam

-media asset management, including workflow manager, proxy generator, transcoder, quality check and integration via plug-in with Adobe Premiere Pro

-traffic\scheduling and advertising management to generate daily playlist

-redundant automation channel with dedicated character generator

– Studio playout for live productions and news

2) Integrated devices\storages

The proposed automation system is based on SI Media controlling via API 2x Belden\Grass Valley K2 for automation (main\bk), studio playout and base band ingest. SI Media provided and integrated in its workflow a GBLabs 96TB storage, FAST NAS F16 NITRO, as central archive.

As deep archive, SI Media is controlling a SONY ODS M30 with a dedicated SI Media plug-in which allows to archive, retrieve and perform partial restoring.

Finally, to automate the controlling of the sources, SI Media has interfaced a EVERTZ XENON 128×128 A/V Router.

Newsno |

16 febbraio 2018

| by SiMedia

CASE STUDY : Televisa (Mexico)

Production Control Room – MediaNews Play (Tijuana-Mexico)

At Televisa, one of the most important broadcasters in Mexico and the biggest content producer in Spanish of the world, SI Media has provided a complete turnkey solution for 3 of their Regional Production Control Rooms.

The system has been deployed by SI Media directly at the customer facility.

Key Points:

– More than 40 users using the NRCS
– 2 Regional Sites with their own PCRs, connected to the Central Site, sharing same MAM and DB
– Turnkey solution from ingest to playout through MAM and NRCS in an highly integrated workflow
– Social Media integration with automated upload on Televisa accounts
– Thanks to the full support of software provider SI Media and a great cooperation with the Tech Dept. of Televisa, the migration from the previous NRCS to SI Media’s MediaNews was completed very quickly: it took less than 3 weeks to be 100% generating the Rundowns and On Air with the new system

The workflow (see below the design) is composed by several servers and workstations Supermicro.
More than 40 users work every day with MediaNews to create stories, prepare rundown and manage all the media of the redaction (video, audio, images, documents..).

The mobile app iMediaNews for both Android and iOS plays a fundamental role to speed-up the ingest of the footages and the production of the stories, especially when they come from a remote location.

The story life of the contents is managed by SI Media from the ingest, both base band based through 2 MediaRec workstations and file ingest from TAPES, portable cards such as XD Cam, P2, ftp servers, directly from the web and from all the interfaced SONY Vegas NLE stations.

The structure of SI Media system, with the deep integration between MAM and NRCS, allowed to cover a complete end-to-end workflow.
The schema requested by Televisa was addressed to manage 3 different sites with a unique system: in the central site of Tijuana are located the redundant Database, the central storage, the MAM\NRCS servers and the main PCR with a MediaNewsPlayer equipped with a Matrox Card Xmio; the two remoted sites, Mexicali and Ensenada, have also their own PCRs too: the Rundonws are generated with the MediaNews Web (browser application) by the journalists, who can also export the bulletin to the dedicated Teleprompters (one per sites). The contents are loaded by SI Media MAM into the remote MediaNewsPlayers, that for those facilities are working with AJA Cards Corvid 22.

In addition to this, using our certified Mos Protocol SI Media has interfaced and integrated 3 Teleprompters from Autocue and the graphics engine provided by Ross, which is remotely controlled by SI Media MediaDevice.

The customer goes on air with 7 bulletins and live editions per day from the central site, besides with SI Media NRCS are generated and managed 3 news editions from the regional sites.
The 3 sites are connected via Fiber Channel, allowing high-speed transfers of the contents and an efficient sharing of the material.

The plug-ins for the Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) and for Youtube make easier to publish directly to the account of Televisa the stories that the journalists select from the MediaNews interface, also thanks to the transcoder farm with the MediaStore Coder module.

The whole process of configuration, installation, testing, training and commissioning took less than 3 weeks: in this time they abandoned the previous system, and they started producing every news edition with SI Media platform.

Newsno |

15 giugno 2017

| by SiMedia

INTERVIEW: Massimo Begotto, SI Media pre-sales manager for CALA

SI Media ‘s presence in the American continent is growing fast, with many systems already deployed and several incoming projects.

We take this occasion to talk about it with Massimo Begotto, SI Media pre-sales manager for CALA, in charge of SI Media branch office in Miami

1) In which countries has SI Media decided to start working and increasing its presence in the last months?

The presence of SI Media in CALA is a fact since many years, as the number of installations has grown starting from the first done in Mexico (2013) to the several we can count currently. Moreover we will update this number very soon, with brand new installations that are about to be deployed.

Apart from the CALA side, the challenge we are now facing is related to the US market: we concretely approached this market last year, with the opening of a new branch in Miami. This is a huge market, we still need to promote our brand but we have already reached many of our goals related to the building of a strong distribution network, with some giants of the market, and the new opportunities that are coming in these very days are the confirmation that we are in the right way.

2) Which are SI Media’s products that have been more successful in this period?

MediaNews, our NRCS module, is for sure the product with more success in the last period. SI Media has continuously developed the platform in order to have a cutting-the-edge digital newsroom, consequently this module is becoming more and more considered in the market: the new GUI, the embedded Social Media Manager, the integration with our MAM and the Proxy Editor lift MediaNews among the most completed and appreciated NRCS worldwide.

Besides I think that what we shown during the last NAB in Las Vegas is very meaningful, as we presented the Studio Automation (for the newsroom) and the Media Cloud (for the automation system), two novities that allows us to provide an even more complete end-to-end workflow. SI Media is well-known for its capability of providing a full solution for broadcasters, with the Cloud module and the NRCS add-on we have significantly enriched our offer. We have listened to the market needs, and the customers are replying positively.

3) How has been your experience in this area so far?

It has been excellent. The area I attend is very heterogeneous, that means we have to study different solutions for very different needs. Therefore I have the opportunity to sit down with the customers to study their needs in details, allowing SI Media to leave them satisfied at the end of the installation, due to its typical Italian capacity of tailoring the products, but allowing also me to live in first person enriching human experiences.

4) And regarding next steps?

The path is already traced: we have to continue on our way to develop the platform, in order to maintain our high-technology standards and a complete solution, especially with the Cloud and Studio Automation modules.

Then to enhance our presence we will go on with the same schemas adopted for the entire CALA, and in parallel we must push on the US side, since we know the potential is enormous and we are sure to have products that can fit with this extraordinary market.

Newsno |

8 aprile 2016

| by SiMedia

CASE STUDY : Pat TV (Bolivia)

SI Media has been selected by Pat TV, http://www.redpat.tv/, one of the main broadcasters in Bolivia, to provide a solution for Media Asset Management and Production Playout for 2 studios in their biggest site in Santa Cruz de la Sierra.

The project has been implemented and deployed through our partner NRD and the systems integrator ProLux.

The workflow can be divided into 3 main areas: ingest, media asset management and production playout.

The ingest platform is composed by:

-1 X MediaRec to perform base band ingest from studios, satellites and live sources

-file ingest from portable cards and cameras (JVC and Sony NX5) in MOV format with simultaneous transcode into MXF performed by SI Media transcoder

-file ingest from ftp, drop folders and NLE workstations (20 concurrent Adobe editors working with MediaStore Client)

The Media Asset Management takes care of the transfers between the storages, bringing the contents into the central archive and then to the production playouts (main and backup), generating the low res copies of the video files in order to be browsed by the client sits (MediaStoreClient) and performing the required transcoding.

For the main production playout SI Media is controlling an Harmonic Spectrum MediaDeck7000, while for the backup MediaNewsplay is running on an IT server equipped with AJA Kona 3G.

Newsno |

5 aprile 2016

| by SiMedia

INTERVIEW: Mr. Juan Carlos Ortolan, Sales Director CALA for SI-Media

In January, SI Media has opened a new office in Miami FL USA, with the aim to better support CALA Market and increase its presence in a region full of opportunities. About this we will speak with Mr. Juan Carlos Ortolan our Sales Director for CALA Region.

1) In which countries has SI Media decided to start working and increasing its presence in the last months?

We have a large territory at CALA, with a mix of languages and cultures. Our goal was to deep scan the region as much as possible by NAB. We went to Central America, Caribbean, then South America and Brazil to finish visiting Mexico before the NAB. Our goal was visiting current SI Media customers in the region as well as develop new opportunities. Parallel to that, we are building brand recognition and setting up a distribution network. Selling software requires good after sales support and we are willing to offer that from Italy, Miami and locally as well.

2) Which are SI Media ’s products that have been more successful in this period?

I’d say that the majority of the customer get really surprised about two things. Generally speaking, about SI Media solution as a really complete workflow solution. Today you may find some MAM, Automation, NRCS suppliers around, but just really few of them may offer such a comprehensive solution as SI Media does. Going to the specifics, most of the customers get impressed with our NRCS when they realize we are able to provide a complete Newsroom solution, MOS compliant. Now journalists can control ingest process either from baseband, watch folders, P2/XDCAM ingest, they can also editing their own clips by either simple mark-in mark-out or Proxy Editing or High-Res by integration with major NLE vendors. They may select the graphics and add the texts and pictures as well as they can Voice Over their own news, import wires, send news to the social media and finally get everything ready for the playout. At the time of News On-Air SI Media controls the A/B/C/D roll Video Server to run A/B roll as well as feed the studio screens, it runs the Character Generator and passes the text along to the Teleprompter.

3) How has been your experience in this area so far?

Very happy with the warm welcome that the market is offering to SI Media. This is a great signal moving forward. So far, just after two months of visiting customers, we are engaged in so many opportunities and we are already closing some of those deals. SI Media solution fits very well to CALA market expectations so we expect having busy time ahead. It will be a good opportunity to demonstrate that behind a good product we have a great team. It’s always good to do business, make new friends and enjoy life and CALA is a nice territory to enjoy culture diversity and people’s friendship.

4) And regarding next steps?

We want to stablish SI Media name in CALA and for doing that we need to prove we are committed to the region and for doing that we have decided to have a strong presence and we are already walking around finding opportunities to demonstrate that we have a great solution and we have a great team behind the product supporting customers. Beyond the current references in the region we are also offering Proof of Concepts in order to demonstrate our technology and to make customers acquainted and confidence with our solutions.

CALA is a huge territory and because of that we are working in building a strong and very committed business partner network for having success and keep customers happy.

We will participate in the major CALA events but most of the time we will be involved with customers developing projects and helping them to do the implementations.