Riyadh Television selects Omneon Media Server

Omneon Video Networks has been selected by Modern Media Systems of Saudi Arabia to provide networked media servers for a major upgrade to the Ministry of Information’s Riyadh Television Studios.
As part of Riyadh TV Centre’s upgrade and conversion to digital television, the Omneon Media Server System has been specified as the server and storage platform for production, editing, and delivery of news and entertainment content. Three LAN-connected Omneon systems are being deployed in a design produced by UK-based EML-TI Ltd. The first Omneon system serves a total of four television studios and a television theater, providing cache recording and ingest facilities. On the same Gigabit Ethernet network, a second Omneon system uses high-quality 50-Mbit MPEG-2 video for recording, editing, and playout in production applications. The third Omneon system is used in a news production environment with 25-Mbit MPEG-2 video.
The Omneon systems were selected in part because of the company’s open standards approach, which ensured that the production applications, including Pinnacle Liquid blue editors, could operate within a shared storage environment. The implementation takes full advantage of Omneon’s data-type independence, which allows the Riyadh TV Centre to use both 50-Mbit MPEG video for program production and 25-Mbit MPEG for news, with networked editors for finishing in both formats.
“One of our goals was to implement the same server infrastructure for both the production and playout functions, and Omneon met the challenge,” said Jamal Ayache, general manager of Modern Media Systems. “The Omneon system provides the best mix of scalability, flexibility, and interoperability, ensuring that as our needs change and expand, we can adapt easily.”
The overall implementation has been designed to be future-proof, with a view to future services migration when required. Although operating initially with various MPEG video formats, the system also includes IMX encoding throughout. In addition, the Omneon system will be MXF- enabled to facilitate interoperability and is also capable of further expansion in coming years.
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