Bahrain’s Information Affairs Authority chooses Masstech

Bahrain’s Information Affairs Authority’s (IAA) has chosen media asset management provider Masstech to embark on an enterprise-wide initiative using Masstech’s TOPAZ+XT version 7.5 to digitise and preserve all Bahrain TV’s content for optimal workflow efficiency. The Bahraini team was at Masstech’s booth at CABSAT to finalise details of the project.

This first-of-a-kind project for Bahrain will involve building a comprehensive digital archive for 55 years of BTV’s broadcast content, with capacity for decades to come. Bahrain TV is presently upgrading all six of its channels to HD and the TOPAZ archive will perform the material handling to Harmonic’s Omneon playout servers under the control of Pebble Beach automation for precise HD file based workflows. TOPAZ’s inline high speed transcoding (HQS) technology will enable interoperability for bridging workflows between BTV’s content creation platforms – these include Avid Interplay, Apple FCP and Adobe Premier.

Shaima Al Hamid, new director of Technical Affairs at IAA said: “We chose Masstech because they have more built-in versatility to provide us with a complete solution for digital archiving, ingest, QC and metadata management. TOPAZ will enhance production giving our staff instant access to archived video footage with the ability to search and view low resolution proxies at their desktop. It is very important for us to preserve and protect our media assets as we invest in more channels and generate more content.”

Masstech’s TOPAZ+XT, the world’s all-in-one HSM, CSM, HQS and media asset management (MAM) system facilitates metadata entries in Arabic and English to improve programme planning, coordination, reduce costs, and enable more streamlined operations. At BTV’s facility in Manama, the installation will comprise IBM servers, a DCS3700 150TB nearline cache, a Spectra multi-frame T950 LTO-5 library, Pulsar-2 QC, 15 XT-Ingest appliances and Masstech’s patented DRAC® redundancy – all integrated and managed by TOPAZ.

Brad Redwood, VP of Sales and Marketing at Masstech said: “We are thrilled to be part of Bahrain TV’s transformation – accelerating the migration from videotape to digital archiving. In our 10^th anniversary as a MAM leader, we are excited to welcome BTV to Masstech’s global family of installations. TOPAZ’s scalable open platform with interfaces to new media and business systems will support the Kingdom’s ambitious expansion plans for years to come.”