Al Mashhad, which went live last month, is looking to target Arab youth with a mix of edgy content and new digital initiatives. Vijaya Cherian takes a tour of the facility with the network’s senior management, and gets a closer look at their tech deployments and a better understanding of their business strategy.
At Dubai Studio City, buildings 15 and 16 were shrouded in mystery throughout 2022 before the hoardings were taken down for the big reveal on January 11: the launch of Arabic-language channel Al Mashhad TV and its brand-new facility. The privately owned linear and multimedia platform hopes to make friends with Gen-Z viewers and take a modern and youth-focused approach to topics within sports, business, climate and sustainability, through documentaries, controversial talk shows and satire, among other approaches.
“Through Al Mashhad, we are revolutionising the television and digital broadcast platforms,” says Al Mashhad GM Tony Khalife, a journalist and news presenter who has become a household name in the Arab world. His new role launches him into a new phase of his career where he will combine the skills garnered from his varied roles within the media business.
“We promise the Arab audience an independent media outlet that adheres to the highest journalistic and professional standards. This stems from our belief that our viewers have the right to access accurate content that represents diverse and bold opinions both in presentation and in format, while upholding our credibility in reporting and analysis,” he says.
“In a unique digital and technologically advanced style, with media experiences presented for the first time in the Arab world, Al Mashhad will showcase a variety of interactive and bold programmes that include the most important and latest political, business and sports news through news bulletins and a group of satirical and critical talk shows.”
Although Khalife helms operations at Al Mashhad, he will also host a couple of talk shows for the channel. Studio Al Arab will feature important personalities with whom he will explore issues of Arab and international importance. In another programme, Tawator Aali, he will debate with two guests “on any bold, political and socially controversial topic, while they will be presenting their viewpoints”.
One area that poses a significant challenge is the technical aspect, with construction still in progress in some areas of the facility.
“The project started around end 2021,” explains Srinivas Kuppa, Head of Technology at Al Mashhad. “The challenge was to turn around the project in terms of planning, designing, building, constructing, deploying technology, testing and commissioning. This included addressing screen architecture and studio designs within just 10 months.”
Early last year, following some meticulous planning, the Al Mashhad team awarded facility construction MEP to Hennessey LLC and broadcast integration to systems integrator One Diversified, also a Dubai Studio City tenant. Despite the global supply chain disruptions, deployment of the technology commenced in June and was completed by November 2022.
Testing, training and rehearsals were conducted in December and the channel successfully went on air last month.
“Our technical objective was to align our content creation with our digital distribution and our satellite TV presence, while also ensuring flexibility to adopt modern technologies, tools and broadcast infrastructure,” explains Kuppa.
Two large 250sqm broadcast studios have been built, with Studio 1 dedicated to programmes and Studio 2 to news. A semi-studio has also been developed and integrated as part of the newsroom. Studios 1 and 2 are fitted with best-of-breed Unreal Engine-based 4K graphics capabilities to enable augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and extended reality (XR) productions.
In addition, Studio 1 is fitted with a 5x7m chromakey for AR and VR sets and a video wall, while Studio 2 boasts a motorised 10m video wall, 5m video walls, a touch screen and three motorised vertical screens. It also has large video wall screens for newsroom shots and a Blackcam dolly for on-air camera moves that require silent, smooth and flawless operation.
Both studios are fitted with Vinten robotic camera systems and a Stanton Jimmy Jib crane, using Grass Valley LDX-98 cameras with 4K capabilities. Each studio includes Avid, Vizrt graphics, Zero Density AR and VR solutions, a Grass Valley router and vision mixer, a Lawo audio mixer, Lawo VSM controls for network audio and video, and ARRI LED lighting with LUPO. They use RTS intercom solutions with Dante, managed by the Lawo VSM control stack including IP audio RAVENA network and Shure microphones.
Both galleries are controlled by Ross studio automation. For digital programmes, a Wirecast system has been put in place. Studio 1 shines with ARRI LED lighting and ETC controls. The lighting in the studios was delivered by local systems integrator Oasis Enterprises. The newsroom also boasts a robotic camera, a Panasonic PTZ with Blackcam tracking and sliding camera.
The team has deployed hybrid infrastructure with HD-SDI, IP-NDI, IP-SRT, IP-Audio AES67, 4K 12G SDI, 4K cameras and 4K LED screens as video walls driven by Vizrt 4K. In addition, hybrid IP NOC-MCR capabilities can adapt any source signal contribution – mobile phones, TVU, Live-u, SRT streams, Ateme decoders, NDI sources, Teams, Zoom, Ross Interstellar and modern IP streaming capabilities, explains Kuppa.
A key aspect of the workflow is the contribution; Al Mashhad uses IBM Aspera Connect for file shares and Live from TVU Anywhere. Among other key systems are a host of solutions from the Avid stable, including NRCS, Cloud UX, Avid PAM, MAM and the Spectra Library with LTO-9 capabilities. Video editing solutions from Avid and Adobe are available, with Resource Scheduling and Booking Systems from the Microsoft stack. Transmission playout is from Pebble Marina with Pebble Dolphin software-defined architecture.
“We built a tier-3 data centre with all modern broadcast technologies and digital capabilities to ensure the speed and flexibility of TV and digital distribution,” Kuppa elaborates. “This means it has highly redundant capabilities and smart controls in place. Our technical infrastructure is uniquely positioned to take any source with quick turnaround to the delivery platforms. The flexibility, quality and ease of operation with mobile journalism from our contributing reporters is especially unique and designed for IP and cloud delivery. With the hybrid approach, we have been able to keep automation and cloud-enabled workflows in focus.”
Wanting to ensure a global impact from day 1, Al Mashhad’s linear channels are available in multiple regions through Nilesat (Eutelsat 7w), Arabsat and Hotbird.
“We will have a global presence through IP distribution with most of the popular networks, to ensure we can reach Arabic-speaking audiences across the world. Technically, our hybrid broadcast infrastructure blended with our micro services architecture will help us reach that viewership,” says Kuppa.
Another tech highlight is the digital area. The facility has three digital zones with the capability to produce shows using NDI and Wirecast for a digital Wirecast system.
“Our digital workflow is enabled with the Ateme Titan encoder. This has a software-defined architecture with global distribution that uses the Brightcove CDN. We also have AWS redundant cloud with Amazon Cloudfront CDN; a mobile app developed using React Native for iOS and Android that supports mobile devices; Apple Watch to handle notifications; a responsive website that works with all major browsers; and a TV app that supports Apple TV, Android TV, LG and Samsung TV,” explains Kuppa.
As with any project today, the Al Mashhad facility has also been designed for the future: “Our broadcast infrastructure is scalable to 4K formats and expandable to include additional capacity – both vertically and horizontally.”
With such a big operation in place at such a fast pace, training was key. “Owing to the speed of the project, we started training resources early in the project with all the support from key suppliers and the help of One Diversified,” explains Kuppa.
Although the team remains cautious about sharing exact figures, they confirm that it is a multimillion-dollar operation. “While we are not an open budget entity, we were accountable to meet the entire project within scope, time and predicted costs. We are proud that this project did not exceed even 1% of the assigned budget,” says Kuppa.
As with any project, there were challenges and struggles with global supply chain issues during Covid. However, Kuppa says the team pre-empted these and “adopted risk-mitigation plans … There were also challenges in the studio to build the look and feel of the studio floor uniquely with LED lights on the floor. However, these were addressed.”
He stresses that Al Mashhad took a “solution-centric approach rather than a vendor-centric approach … We believe in the ecosystem. Therefore, after several demos and POCs, we believe that the ecosystem we have created ensures the best balance of technology and usability compared to alternative solutions.”
For now, Al Mashhad is based in Dubai with a large operation that includes on-prem studios, a data centre and an entire UPS facility should there be a power cut.
“We have five smart UPS systems installed in the facility. Two are connected for redundancy to the data centre and the rest support the technical rooms and the studio facility. The entire facility is backed up by a generator that runs automatically over ATS with the ability to detect incoming power failures. It has a continuous running capacity of 24 hours or more.”
But there are ambitious plans to “expand worldwide, as we see the world as a studio”, says Kuppa. “Our partners across the region provide fast turnaround content to serve us packaged content using frame. io collaborative tools. This allows us flexibility to receive content from anywhere in the world.”
The tech part is only the “beginning of Al Mashhad’s dream”, though. “More is yet to come,” Kuppa offers mysteriously.
Although the technology is now there, GM Khalife knows that the success of the channel will rest on the power of its content and on targeting a younger audience.
“The need of the hour is for Arab audiences to have an experience that is focused on meeting their aspirations and needs of the new generations and contributing to shaping their visions for the future. Our focus is on never-seen-before content. We aim to present content that brings change and development in the media, to engage younger generations and to benefit from the digital transformation in the region. Al Mashhad is led by an exceptional team of specialists in the field to create outstanding content that tackles the most important issues and topics for the Arab viewer in an innovative manner. Good content is our priority; advertising will follow our success on the content side,” he says confidently.
Al Mashhad presently houses around 300 employees, with plans to expand the team further in the region and beyond, the GM concludes.
Talking Digital- Maroun Bedran – Head of Digital at Al Mashhad
At Al Mashhad we are implementing a digital-first, end-to-end strategy which allows us to deploy adaptive, customised content based on analytics through a personalised AI-powered user experience. Once we identified our target audience, we have endeavoured to offer a seamless integration between linear TV and our digital platforms to reach them via their preferred information and communication channels.
Therefore, we work on adapting content pieces to be shared in an optimised way by drawing on each platform’s features to offer the most interactive experience. In addition, we look for select content opportunities that are bolstered through livestreaming, hence offering more live audience engagement with our formats.
Our channel and platforms work seamlessly within an ecosystem that offers continuous viewing experience for our audiences between platforms, instead of a duplication. This helps us in driving a more tailored and efficient content strategy targeted directly for each different platform’s audience’s preferences and format consumption, to give them an intuitive experience.
