Weybridge, UK, June 11, 2018 – Pebble Beach Systems, a leading automation, content management and integrated channel specialist, today announced that India's Public Service Broadcaster, Doordarshan, has selected the Pebble Beach Systems Marina automation system for its flagship 24 hour news channel, DD News.
With over 100 million viewers across the country, DD News is India’s main terrestrial/satellite news channel. The channel produces over 17 hours of live transmission and 30 news bulletins in Hindi, English, Urdu and Sanskrit. Additionally, DD’s regional news units produce four daily regional shows, and the channel broadcasts daily sports bulletins, a business show, current affairs programs and several special shows on health, youth issues, arts and culture, and international events.
The Marina system, which will be commissioned in the coming weeks, features a MOS interface and offers emergency ingest capability from a live feed. Supplied as a fully redundant system with automatic changeover, it is being installed to replace Doordarshan’s ageing Omnibus playout automation, which is no longer supported.
“This contract represents an important milestone for our expansion into India. We’re honored to have been chosen by Doordarshan for this project, and look forward to a long and successful working relationship with them,” said Samir Isbaih, Pebble’s Regional Manager for the Middle East and South Asia.
“As legacy automation systems reach end-of-life, broadcasters want to take advantage of the flexibility and power of centralized, software-based automation systems. With Pebble’s automation systems, we are enabling our customers to put in place a painless, phased transition strategy that allows them to import legacy databases into Marina to ease the migration. This makes us a strong candidate for the replacement of many vendors’ systems,” he added.
A powerful automation solution with embedded content management, Marina is unique in its ability to evolve any playout infrastructure from legacy device control to incorporate new and evolving technologies, with minimum disruption to processes and staff. With Marina, not only is all metadata crucial to the description and playback of assets transferred, but an active database bridge is also created between the legacy system and the new one to keep them in sync and enable them to run in parallel.
“In a time of tremendous change and consolidation both at the supplier and end user level in the broadcast and media industry, Pebble’s specialist focus and experience with high-end tier one broadcasters helps them to remain a trusted partner for broadcasters as they transition to newer technologies, including virtualization and the cloud,” stated Pradeep Singh Kohli, Director at Shaf Broadcast, Pebble’s partner in India.
Ashok Kumar Pathak, Deputy Director of Engineering at Doordarshan News confirmed: “We’re looking forward to working with Pebble and Marina as we migrate to this state of the art playout platform”.
