Fourth Annual Excellence Awards
Newsroom technology – Network nominee

The plan entailed launching seven 24-hour news channels, with the majority of their content resources shared from one facility, while concurrently migrating to digital. Another goal was to improve their journalists’ control over the production technology. The ultimate goal was to build a completely integrated, seamless system of diverse equipment that would operate under the control of a powerful, easy-to-use automation system.

Sahara TV chose Leitch’s NEXIO NewsNet system as the technical core for its ability to meet the network’s key requirements: scalability and highly efficient content sharing. It enables the network to easily and economically add channels, bandwidth and storage, and allows all of the channels and network ports to simultaneously access content without restriction. Using the nonlinear editors, journalists now have access to clips in shared storage the moment ingest begins.

The facility now houses three fully mirrored domains with total storage capability of more than 3500 hours to support its current and future news channels. NEXIO NX2000MS mirror server provides data mirroring in each domain and keeps the content in main and backup systems synchronized.

The system links the facility’s ENPS newsroom computer system with automation tools for sequencing broadcast news stories. Automation by OmniBus Systems ensures all systems are integrated and MOS-compliant.

The automation, coupled with Leitch distribution and routing systems, handles ingest simply and efficiently despite the size of the system. To maintain optimum quality during ingest, Leitch DPS-575 digital processing synchronizers and NEO Simplicity modules (DAS-3901) with full control are installed in each path, converting analog audio to digital and synchronizing it to the video.

Thousands of feeds are recorded on a daily basis, so all feeds are given a specific name or ID through the automation so they can be easily located and accessed from the massive database. The ingested feed is stored in DV-25 format (high resolution) on the SAN, accessible by the editors in the NewsFlash craft edits, and in MPEG-1 format on the browse server, accessible to the journalists sitting on the ENPS terminals through the hy-brow application. Completed rundowns are published from the ENPS terminal, and on-air clips are taken to air from OmniBus. NEXIO PlayList works as a backup to the facility’s automation system.