Etere for Orbit TV

ORBIT transfers a 3 channels playout facility from Rome to Beirut and chooses Etere for the management and the playout of their channels.

ETERE is a leading company that provides a complete range of software broadcasting solutions in the same framework (scheduling, traffic, Airtime sales, automation, media asset management indexing – MAM, archiving, ingest, news integration and playout, logging and audience control, proxy, workflow management, Web integration, music scheduling, etc.) for 16 years.

The ORBIT satellite television and radio network is the world’s first fully digital, multi-channel, multi-lingual, pay television service that broadcasts from more than 20 territories and provides a vast selection of entertainment, music and information in English and Arabic.

Orbit decided to transfer the playout facility of 3 TV channels from Rome to Beirut in Lebanon and on this occasion also decided to replace the existing Harris/Omnibus automation systems with ETERE in order to upgrade to a more powerful, fully integrated, flexible, complete, easy to use system and win the challenge to “have more for less” at the same time.

The 3 channels we are talking about are: Prime (a generic channel), Music Now (a thematic music channel) and Fann (50% music and 50% generic channel).

Since Orbit needs to manage thematic music channels, Etere has provided the music manager software module, a tool specifically designed to help such kinds of broadcasters to create automatically daily musical playlists according to their needs and the musical format required during the different timescales of the day.

With ETERE, Orbit goes to an integrated solution that controls everything for scheduling, music scheduling, ingest, playout, proxy and Web integration.

The main modules of the ETERE software used in this installation are:
■Etere Main for the asset creation with integrated tape library management, the programs/commercials manual planning and the management of the playlists
■Etere Music Manager for the automatic musical playlist creation
■Etere Recording for the ingestion (manual, automatic, scheduled recording)
■Etere Automation Main & Clone: two synchronized systems with automation controllers running two independent copies of the same playlist, ready to switch in case of fault on the main video server decoders or on the main On Air PCs, able to guarantee the continuity of the playout and a high system realiability
■Etere Transcoding for the proxy content generation
■Etere Browsing for the proxy content preview, playout preview (including logos) and the asset EDL creation
■Etere Web for the access to the asset database, the clips lowres browsing and the playout status control through internet

In Orbit’s installation Etere runs on 15 users (workstations) and the devices that ETERE controls for the ingestion and the playout are the following:
■ 3 VTRs for the ingestion
■ 3 nodes SeaChange video server
■ 1 Leitch audio/video matrix
■ 1 Leitch IconMaster
■ 1 Leitch Logo Motion
■ 2 Inscriber INCA RTX