ARTE Selects Marina System To Renew Playout Automation

Pebble Beach Systems has announced that ARTE, the European culture channel, has chosen the Marina automation system to renew its playout automation and manage the synchronisation of playlists across multiple locations as part of its new disaster recovery infrastructure.

ARTE offers a wide range of diverse and multi-lingual cultural programs to over 165 million households across Europe. Ever since its inception, ARTE has broadcast the same programs in two languages, in France and Germany.

As the first broadcaster to create a bi-lingual television channel for two distinct audiences, ARTE has always been at the forefront of new technology adoption. Today the station, which broadcasts entirely in HD, manages its main playout operations from its offices in Strasbourg, France, with a disaster recovery center located just across the border in Germany.

Jean-Michel Roy, Technical engineering service manager at ARTE, said: "We have three transmission lists for each channel: one main, one back up and one for disaster recovery. Each channel’s main playlists and back up playlists are located in the main building in Strasbourg, while our French and German channels DR playlists are located in Germany."

To help synchronize all its broadcast operations ARTE recently purchased a Marina automation system from Pebble Beach Systems.

"We needed to find a robust and reliable automation system that would keep our French and German playlists perfectly synchronised and integrate our DR site so that it would instantly and automatically take over in case of a system break down or emergency," Mr Roy added.

ARTE conducted a long and thorough evaluation into various automation systems and chose Marina for its flexible and reliable architecture, and also for its user-friendly interface.

Roy continued: "The feedback from our operators so far has been positive. The user interface is very straightforward and we expect a very smooth transition for all our staff. Pebble Beach Systems was able to develop an interface between our in house proprietary traffic system and Marina, and in spite of the vast scope of this project, we anticipate that the integration into our existing workflow infrastructure will be pretty straightforward."

ARTE is planning a staged implementation of the new automation system, and Roy and his team anticipate that the move to Marina in the DR site will be completed by October 2016 while the main site will be finalized by April 2017.

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