INTERVIEW: Daniele Sorrenti, IT Manager A3News
A few weeks ago, at the end of April, SI Media successfully completed the migration from a video-server to a complete IT AJA-based environment at Antenna 3 Nordest, one of the biggest broadcasters in the north part of Italy. We take this opportunity to talk about this process with Mr Daniele Sorrenti, CTO and IT Director at Antenna 3 Nordest.
1)Which have been the reasons that persuaded you to opt for the migration to a fully IT AJA-based environment?
The economic landscape of the local and regional broadcasters has changed after the beginning of the digital terrestrial era. The proposal is much larger and the hard competition forced a deep optimization of the resources. Comparing to 10 years ago, the IT-based solutions are mature enough to offer an optimum balance among reliability, flexibility and ROI.
2)Why you chose as playout and acquisition boards AJA?
We chose AJA because of the ease of integration with our actual infrastructure and workflow and for the high level support assistance provided by SI Media team.
3)How have you managed the migration between the two environments, keeping in mind that it involved 10 main automation channels, 4 backup channels and 2 ingest channels in a system currently on-air?
We already had SI Media software platform and this was an important advantage. For each play-out we collected the hardware and software settings necessary to support the old and the new format of the clips, keeping the same database and interfaces with the already existing audio-video infrastructure. Therefore, channel by channel, we skipped to the its backup and then back to the new main player. All occured in a couple of hours, with just few seconds of interruption.
4) What benefits have you gained in this first period after the migration in terms of reliability, flexibility and performance?
More than the 60% of the clips now comes directly from file ingest, allowing the reduction of base band ingest (1:1 needed time), which now involves only the studio productions. The access to the archived contents is simple and quick, and now can be done also by operators not expertise or equipped with dedicated workstations. The technical staff now has more time to do other activities.
