Al-Manar Upgrades from Imagine to Etere ETX

Lebanese satellite television station, Al-Manar extends its partnership with Etere. Al-Manar has been a customer of Etere since 2014 and the station recently chose to upgrade the Imagine playout system to Etere ETX.

Al-Manar has chosen Etere's breakthrough Channel-in-a-Box software Etere ETX and upgraded to its latest version, Etere 31.3. The station was launched on June 4th 1991 as a member of the Arab States Broadcasting Union. Etere's commitment to its research and development empowers media organizations like Al-Manar with the latest technological developments curated by Etere’s expert team, furthermore, users on the support contracts have access to unlimited software updates and upgrades. Etere Ecosystem was first installed at Al-Manar in 2014. The station extended its partnership with Etere after experiencing its exceptional real-world scalability, flexibility and cost-efficiency. With evolving business needs, the station needed to move quickly to expand its playout capabilities. After a series of demonstrations and evaluations, Al-Manar decided to replace its existing playout facilities with Etere ETX. As one of Etere's success stories, Al-Manar continues to leverage Etere innovative technologies to maximize efficiencies and monetization opportunities.

Etere ETX integrates all the playout features needed to bring a channel on-air including ingest, 4K playout, closed caption/subtitling insertions, dynamic overlays, text over recorded/live videos, NDI, IP and SDI inputs/outputs in a single software. Etere brings greater efficiencies with user-friendly deployments, operations and upgrades. Due to its exceptional features, Etere ETX will replace the already outdated Imagine Nexio video servers.

The software delivers professional quality with the full flexibility of multi-resolution support including 4K, HD and SD. Additionally, the open architecture and interoperability of Etere Ecosystem solutions ensure future expansions can be completed with minimal disruptions to the operations. Key features of Etere ETX include,
■ Multiple graphics and webGL graphics overlays
■ Capture web pages as live multimedia sources
■ 4K, HD, and SD with Up and Downconversion
■ RTMP input and integrated time delay
■ Serves as an RTMP sender or RTSP receiver
■ Full IP support for both HD and SD video supports NewTek NDI
■ Supports multiple layers of graphics
■ Fully compliant DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting) stream
■ Supports Microsoft ReFS File System, cloud-ready
■ The included graphics engine allows overlay of static/animated logos and crawlers on 8 layers
■ Able to perform IP in and IP out, with multiple frame rates and independent IP out services
■ Integrated IT-based master control with multichannel ingest/playout
■ Easy insertion of closed captions including CEA 608 and CEA 708 with ETX inserter
■ Create live subtitling seamlessly with ETX inserter and time delay
■ SDI output with support for selected cards (SDI or IP) including Blackmagic, Matrox
■ File formats include LXF, MOV, MXF, GXF, ASF, MPG-TS, MPG-PS, AVI, DV and MKV
■ Video codecs include DVCPRO, MPG1, MPG2, MPG4, H.264, HEVC/ H.265, DNxHD, ProRes
■ Audio codecs include AAC, MP2, MP3, Flac
■ Minimum video duration 75 frames, can vary with format
■ Graphics files include TGA, AVI, MOV, SWF, PNG, JPEG, GIF
■ Picture-in-Picture (PIP) capabilities: Insert multiple overlays of live graphics and videos over a streaming video
■ Supports 64-bits and microservices