PokerItalia24 Selects Etere

PokerItalia24 has chosen Etere's workflow-based software solutions to manage the playout of its thematic channel

PokerItalia24 is a thematic channel dedicated to the poker world (live and on-line).PokerItalia24 broadcasts the most important national and international poker tournaments besides other programs related to this game, 24/24 on digital terrestrial and satellite.PokerItalia24 is involved in live tournaments and other poker-oriented formats production together with 2Bcom and counts several well kwnon italian poker players among its commentators. Etere MERP approach has been provided to PoketItalia24 with the latest workflow-based modular software solutions. Thanks to Etere modules the customer has been able to create, run and control all the workflows needed to manage and playout the TV channel using a reliable, integrated and cost efficient distributed architecture. PokerItalia24 has appointed GCI Gruppo Comunicazione Italia as broadcasting service company for the channel playout, part of the ingest process and content archive operations. However PokerItalia24 creates and manages daily scheduling remotely by itself using the Etere Executive Editor that permits a frame accurate planning of all those assets intended to be aired and a comprehensive management of the related secondary events with proxy preview capability. Also every time the scheduling is created or changed, Etere F90 tool exports automatically the EPG file to an external FTP server where the EPG machine is connected to. Etere TV Automation module broadcasts TV channel programming including secondary events as logos, crawls and audio/video router switching, through a fully redundant system. Etere TV Automation controls the playout of the same playlist from two video servers (in sync) via two different PCs to grant the transmission continuity both in case of failure or maintenance of the playout chain (video servers, secondary devices, IT infrastructure, software upgrades/updates, etc.). Etere TV Automation switches automatically to clone in case of failure of the main chain. Etere Ingest module is used to manually/automatically capture HiRes video contents into the video servers then an Etere transcoding process creates the corresponding proxy file that's used by the operators for content preview and setting asset's mark points (SOM, EOM, commercials break interruption point, bulk video, etc.) both using intranet or internet. Video files transfer among video servers (main and backup)and/or disks-based nearline storages is performed automatically by Etere Media Manager according to the channel rules set in the workflow designed by the customer. Etere Media Manager is an integrated software module tool which is responsible for content availability whenever and wherever they are required. The video content files that need to be archived for long-time or must be part of the TV channel historical archive are taken into account by Etere HSM that stores them into the LTO4 cartridges of a digital tape library. When the operator schedules an event to broadcast, it doesn't matter where the media is because Etere will send automatically the request to Etere Media Manager or to Etere HSM in order to restore it where needed, on time. These software modules play a central role in such modern installations where multiple video servers and storages are available in order to achieve a fully redundant ingest/playout system and share contents for increased reliability.

Etere system exploits the potential from the equipment used by this channel, which is composed by the following devices:
2 GrassValley K2 stand/alone servers
1 disks-based nearline storage
2 VTRs ingest
1 Audio/Video router switcher Pro-Bel Sirius
1 Logo Miranda LGK 3901
1 IBM LTO4 digital tape library

Etere, a consistent system