The fully functional TV production environment was first set up as a test assembly at Qvest’s premises in Cologne, Germany before it was shipped to the broadcaster's headquarters in Saudi Arabia.
German systems integrator Qvest has designed and developed a fully equipped mobile TV station for Arabic 24/7 multi-platform service Asharq News. The end-to-end media architecture for contribution, content production, and distribution, based on new media and IT technologies, will ensure more versatile production options for Asharq News with fast set-up times, international deployment capabilities, and remote connectivity.
The production setup covers all media workflows from ingest to playout, and offers full connectivity into the corporate and broadcast network infrastructure. This allows the setup to be used on short notice anywhere on location for breaking news or to increase coverage at existing and new sites for the broadcaster. Therefore, the working environment for live news reporters may be assembled, disassembled, and shipped easily and quickly.
The fully functional TV production environment was first set up as a test assembly at Qvest’s premises in Cologne, Germany before it was shipped to the broadcaster’s headquarters in Saudi Arabia.
Speaking about the installation, Omran Abdallah, CTO of Asharq News said: “This new mobile TV production setup means a major upgrade for our 24/7 multiplatform approach at Asharq News. Our team will benefit from the extensive features of the system, especially from the fact that we can now broadcast live at short notice from practically any location in the world in absolute top-end quality. Thanks to this latest collaboration with Qvest, we are taking the broadcasting experience for our audience to the next level.”
The media professionals at Asharq News benefit from a complete TV live news production setup and a studio environment with the integration of systems by industry-leading specialist companies. This includes Grass Valley cameras with Augmented Reality (AR) functions, a full production gallery with camera control, video and audio mixing, and Avid FastServe studio playout.
Qvest integrated Vizrt’s XR Set and stYpe’s camera tracking technology for optional state-of-art AR visuals.
Mohamed Hamid, Principal at Qvest Dubai added: “Given the very short time frame and the very large technical scope, this was a special project. A key success factor was the excellent, international collaboration of our Qvest team with the partners at Asharq News. With our best-of-breed principle for media technology, we have together defined a new standard for mobile news production.”
The newsroom environment features up to 40 workstations for reporters, including an Avid PAM system with 480 Terabyte of usable Avid NEXIS media storage. In addition, the journalists at Asharq News benefit from the dedicated Avid iNews newsroom software, MCUX editing, voice-over capabilities, the software-based IP compliance solution Mediaproxy, and the full integration of the broadcaster’s news agencies.
The setup also contains Media Composer edit suites as well as fully equipped workstations for creative graphics editing. A fully equipped master control room is also integrated with full contribution, quality control, and distribution functions.
IP-streaming functions were implemented with products from Ateme, Riedel, Skype, and TVU Networks. The extensive setup with more than 8,500 meters of cable on an area of 180 square meters was successfully initialised in March 2022
