Astro Cyberjaya
Aug 1, 2007 12:00 PM, by Alan Pimm
Aaia's premiere tapeless digital broadcast center
Astro’s transmission area features OmniBus workstations and Barco monitor stacks.
The shift from tape-based to file-based broadcasting began at isolated locations in Europe, Japan and the United States during the 1990s and has since become a worldwide phenomenon. This transition is an inevitable response to progress in disc-based data storage capacity, speed and affordability.
ATG Broadcast recently completed a new 65-channel tapeless digital broadcast center in Cyberjaya, Malaysia, for Astro All Asia Network. Astro is a cross-media operator with direct-to-home (DTH) satellite television services in Malaysia and Indonesia.
The Cyberjaya Broadcast Centre (CBC) is a 24-hour facility that supports origination, post production, playout, archiving, subscription management and uplinking. Television content arriving at the facility is edited to provide programs of the required length and to create promotional clips for each channel. Where necessary, programs are subtitled into the four main languages of the region: Bahasa Malaysia, Chinese, English and Hindi. Multilingual audio tracks are available for selected programs to augment the subtitling feature. Dubbing can be done in Bahasa Malaysia, Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese, English, and Tamil.
New site, new technology
The new center needed to complement the existing All Asia Broadcast Centre (ABC), which has been on-air 24/7 since it was built in 1996. Located on 117,000 square metres in Malaysia’s Multimedia Super Corridor, ABC has a total floor area of 35,000 square metres and is also the original teleport site for Malaysia East Asia Satellite (MEASAT), Astro’s sister company, which operates the four satellites.
Introducing dual-site operation meant that satellite uplinks could be switched to minimize the risk of rain-induced microwave signal fade caused by tropical thunderstorms. Additional channel capacity was also needed to serve a newly launched satellite.
Astro’s master control room features 4 x 2 Barco 67in rear-projection monitor walls.
Malaysia’s broadcasting regulations require that all transmitted content must be suitable for family viewing and conform to a strict code of ethics. Therefore, all acquired material, whether on physical media or live satellite feed, requires compliance editing.
Astro also transmits to Indonesia, which has its own set of broadcast regulations. Storing the original physical copy plus two edited transmission copies requires three times the amount of storage, along with associated media management and digital file transfers.
One solution was to allow dual-site working using dual archives with media mirrored across both sites. Each site would uplink part of the channel bouquet. If a problem arose at either site, the uplink could be reconfigured quickly to transmit the most popular channels while the problem was fixed. Six versions of each program would need to be archived if traditional full-length versions were stored.
Astro decided to adopt a different approach. A more efficient option was to store the source copy, and the edit decisions and transitions of the version for a specific broadcast slot, thus avoiding the need to save the entire program each time it was repurposed. Successful implementation required a complex automated workflow and the appropriate tools.
Pre-implementation system trial
The master control room also includes four Miranda Kaleido K2 multiviewers, which can handle 24 inputs
With a complex workflow, it’s necessary to define and test before implementing. Manufacturers’ test facilities do not have the full complement of what is needed, and they are shared with other projects. Therefore, the CBC project required a dedicated pilot system.
The objective was to demonstrate ingest, compliance editing and output of Windows Media 9 files for subtitling, transfer to archive as an MXF file, restore from archive to server for transmission, and the automated workflows required to deliver the above.
ATG was selected to manage the project and test and develop workflow before implementation. The company was chosen because it has a proven track record of delivering large-scale, file-based transmission systems in Europe and understanding the associated complex networking requirements. The company assisted Astro in specifying and designing a scalable, nonblocking system architecture that could operate across multiple sites.
Complex workflows that originate in the broadcast management system are passed to OmniBus G3 workflow managers. To deliver the required automated media processing, an OmniBus Colossus automation system controls multiple Quantel sQ ingest and production servers, Omneon Spectrum transmission servers and a Front Porch Digital DIVArchive driving a Sun StorageTek SL8500 storage library. The equipment was selected on the basis of proven signal quality and reliability, ease of interfacing to the control system, and ease of operation and maintenance.
After conducting the pre-implementation trial, ATG designed, installed and commissioned CBC as a total system comprising:
- a satellite downlinking and incoming lines area;
- an ingest and compliance editing plus versioning area;
- a multichannel transmission area;
- reactive transmission suites and voice-over booths; and
- a master control room.
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