Al Sharqiya TV Gets Tyrell Newsroom

A leading creative technology solutions provider for the broadcast and post production industry, Tyrell CCT, has announced that the company has provided a privately owned Iraqi satellite television channel with a complete end-to-end digital newsroom solution for their new London based news bureau.
Al Sharqiya Television's newsroom technology is based on an innovative workflow designed by Tyrell CCT and incorporates Avid Interplay and Avid Unity MediaNetwork for production asset management, together with Avid iNEWS for story creation to provide an efficient and flexible news solution for the rapidly expanding Arabic television broadcaster.
The solution enables Al Sharqiya to embrace the latest advancements in tapeless workflows and facilitates collaborative news production processes and streamlined workflows between its regional production sites and external news agencies.
The combination of Avid Interplay and Avid Unity MediaNetwork systems ensures real-time media access and media management throughout Al Sharqiya’s newsroom enabling fast, efficient story creation.
The Avid iNEWS computer system provides the broadcast team with complete control of newsroom operations direct from their desktops. Al Sharqiya has also invested in Avid AirSpeed Multi Stream ingest and playout servers, Avid Interplay Transfer, and a number of Avid Newscutter and Interplay Assist editing clients.
This complete set of tools allows Al Sharqiya to generate news stories in their London office from re-purposed agency feeds and in-house studio recordings and to manage the entire news process encompassing story creation, media ingest and logging through to editing and play-to-air.
A key feature of the workflow designed by Tyrell CCT is the fully automated ingest of a file-based Reuters newsfeed directly on to the Avid Unity storage and in to the Avid Interplay database.
This complete digital workflow is accomplished by combining Grab Networks Anystream Agility with Avid Interplay Transfer for seamless background ingest.
To complete and future proof their solution Al Sharqiya has added an Avid Interplay Archive server in conjunction with a SGL FlashDisk Cache and a Spectralogic tape library.
Providing full integration to their Interplay system and allowing for easy object based searches across multiple storage repositories, this gives Al Sharqiya a choice of storage managed from a single unified console.
In addition to consultancy and system design, Tyrell CCT provided Al Sharqiya with customized solution training to ensure all staff were fully familiar with the new systems.
"Tyrell CCT collaborated closely with Al Sharqiya from the initial engagement through to delivery to achieve a customised workflow and newsroom solution that is highly scalable and future proof," said Nick Soper, Technical Director, Tyrell CCT.
"Our in-depth experience of the broadcast sector enabled us to clearly recognise the challenges faced by Al Sharqiya and to identify a workflow that maximises the broadcaster's digital media assets and increases productivity and efficiencies."
Ahmed Bin Afif, Chief Engineer, Al Sharqiya said: "We were looking to build a state-of-the-art newsroom system that would allow us to deliver compelling news stories in an efficient and flexible manner.
"The combination of Avid's powerful end-to-end news system and Tyrell CCT's local expertise has resulted in the smooth delivery of a comprehensive and high quality news solution that can be easily expanded to meet the demands of an ever-changing industry."
Al Sharqiya is Iraq's first privately owned satellite channel. The station was launched in March 2004 and has gained a growing audience with its mixture of news, current affairs and comedy shows. Please visit www.alsharqiya.com for further information.
(BMcc/GK)