CASE STUDY : TFC (Tokyo)
At the beginning of 2018 SI Media has deployed a full automation system at TFC – Tohokushinsha Film Corporation -, based in Tokyo.
Like in the previous projects, the local partner and systems integrator has been Ideal Systems Japan.
TFC needed to automate the playout 24/7 for its four VOD channels, in HD. Given this, the installation includes 4 MediaPlay that air IGO, STAR EX, FAMILY NEO, SHOGI PLUS, in a full-redundant environment with 4 clone playout backups. The whole system is based on IT-servers using AJA KONA4 boards.
The playlists are generated in two ways: three channels are managed with MediaList, the SI Media traffic system, and this allows to manage in details each event. The switching commands and the secondary events can be scheduled in advance, and also the rights for each content related to a deal are administered through MediaList. The remaining channel instead has the daily playlists made by NEC traffic system, in a proprietary format well known by SI MEDIA: the integration of NEC traffic system is made with MediaLinker, SI MEDIA‘s module that allows the import of the 3rd party daily playlist.
SI Media has integrated a VIDEOTRON 16×16 A/V Router to manage automatically all the sources, feeds from satellites, studios, cameras from the Master Control Room with the MediaDevice; the character generators are provided by SI Media as well, with a MediaCG engine dedicated to each output channel.
On the other side, with 3 MediaRec Servers managing 1 input channel each, TFC has its automated base-band ingest suite, fundamental for archiving and reusing all material needed and used by the 4 channels.
The core of the system is a SI MEDIA MAM SUITE: first of all, every asset is quality-checked and eventually transcoded if the starting format is not the right one. After this check, the assets is moved to the central storage and, from here, copied by the MAM Mover Engine to the local storage of the playouts that requires this asset. Users can access the asset management to browse the catalogued material, search, check the status of each asset and add metadata.
