Pinnacle Systems MediaStreams chosen by SABC

The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) are replacing their aging, first generation servers with two Pinnacle Systems’ MediaStream 1600s on-air servers.
They were chosen after an exhaustive evaluation process in which SABC looked at servers from five different manufacturers.
Following a thorough decision analysis process, MediaStream 1600 and one other were selected to go through to the next stage. This is where the SABC engineers did some hands-on testing, after which they all agreed on the Pinnacle product.
James Hill, Technology Manager, Broadcast, SABC, explained why they went for the MediaStream: “The most important thing for us was that our new on-air server would playout first time, every time. Commercials are an important source of revenue for us and we have to have equipment that helps us keep our competitive edge. Because we book ads right up to the last minute our server must let us slot them in to the schedule, however late. MediaStream lets us do this and we are very pleased with it.
“During our evaluation process we looked at everything including redundancy, ease of capacity, maintenance and upgrading. At the moment we are using three ingest channels, two play-out channels and we will add more when we need to. We also spoke to a few MediaStream users and none of them said anything negative about the system.”
(GB)