PROVYS Bridges Another Gap In Istanbul

In the modern world, business development requires the bridging of many gaps. On the eastern edges of Europe, by the famous Bosphorus Bridge, TTNET have selected Provys Software Architecture to bridge their gap over the dire straits between telco and broadcast operations.

TTNET, a subsidiary of Türk Telekom Group (Turkish Telecom), is the largest Internet service provider in Turkey and has around seven million subscribers. TTNET has evolved into a leading technology company that offers communication and entertainment services together, by "bridgeheading" digital transformation. Their current VOD platform, TIVIBU, is now expanding into a set of Pay TV channels. These new channels will be fully prepared in Provys.
Provys is used for rights management - description of all acquired licences and licence conditions, programme planning - preparation of long-term programme plans, and transmission scheduling - preparation of complete daily playlists, which are exported to Grass Valley's Cobalt automation and played out from K2 servers. After transmission, as-run logs from Cobalt are processed by Provys to calculate licence amortisation and prepare post-transmission reporting.
Provys receives information about available programmes from TTNET's internal information system Jira. Provys scans the Isilon NAS storage for available media in regular intervals using Provys Media Layer tools, analyses the media and automatically assigns them to relevant programmes.
TTNET has chosen Provys for its ability to easily bridge the overall infrastructure of TTNET and the new playout technology delivered by a major Turkish system integrator AVKOM. One of the major criteria for choosing Provys was the ability of the team to deploy the solution completely within a short period of time available before the on-air date.
The major advantages of using Provys in TTNET's operations include efficient preparation of complete transmission plans for Cobalt automation, automatic verification of licence conditions, media status, and other key factors which could cause problems if handled manually.
The use of Provys allows excellent utilisation of purchased rights, avoiding both waste of licences and their accidental overuse outside allowed conditions. Highlights using colours and icons in scheduling help the schedulers to quickly spot various issues with media, for example, not being ready for transmission in time.
Abdullah Sen, of the system integrator AVKOM, says: "We have included Provys in the solution because it offers an easy way for the TTNET team to prepare complete playlists for the Grass Valley Cobalt automation we are putting in place in TTNET. Working with the Provys team is a great experience for us, from both the human and technical points of view."
Dan Stourac, Provys Project Manager, says: "TTNET couldn't hire dozens of people for the new operation; that wouldn't be efficient. They needed an efficient tool to allow a small team of experienced planners to handle everything with minimum manual work. Provys clearly is the best fit.
"As a matter of fact, this is a continuation of our long-term goal of providing our clients with an end-to-end workflow engine to bridge the complete process of broadcast preparation from strategic decisions, though daily operations, to media handling and playlist delivery.
"Provys has been providing such solutions for over 17 years, has gained significant experience in this task from over 40 installations and hundreds of TV channels in various environments. One of the strongest features of Provys is allowing easy and cost-effective increase in the number of channels managed.
"The future plans of TTNET include the use of Provys for Advertisement Time Sales and more media workflow management. The Air-time Sales Module from Provys is another comprehensive package of software that helps media enterprises become more efficient and productive. It has been a great experience working with the TTNET and AVKOM teams on this project.
"They are very enthusiastic and help us get the operation running in a very short time frame. This is our first project in Istanbul and we believe that our Turkish office, with it's director Erinc Ilktan, will be busy building more bridges soon."

The article is also available to read in Broadcast Film & Video online.