German broadcaster chooses Quantel’s integrated news system

WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk), the largest member of Germany’s ARD public network, has ordered a generationQ integrated news production system from Quantel for the production of its daily ‘Morgenmagazin’ programme.
General Contractor for the project is BFE Studio and Medien Systeme GmbH, Mainz.
The generationQ system comprises five Quantel sQ servers providing a total of 260 hours of broadcast quality storage and 250 hours of browse (1.5Mbit) storage. All media on all servers is locked together under a single Quantel ISA (Integrated Server Architecture) database. Craft editing is handled via three QEdit Pro systems and there are also several QCut and QView stations connected. In addition the system supports 50 desktop browse/editing applications. Ingest and playout automation is by Omnibus, with a Quantel sQFX server control panel providing playout redundancy.
Morgenmagazin runs for three and a half hours every day, and combines live inserts with studio presentations and feeds from other stations around in Germany.
“The Morgenmagazin project marks WDR’s entry into a networked production and storage environment where newsroom, production and archive systems are all integrated into a single overarching system,” said Heinz Deiters of WDR. “To achieve this requires both flexibility and scalability in every component of the system. Quantel’s system architecture naturally lends itself to open media teamworking with Omnibus for media management and Dalet ANN’s newsroom system. This was the crucial factor in arriving at our selection of BFE’s Quantel-based offer.”
The system will be operational by the end of this year when Morgenmagazin moves to its new home in WDR’s Studio C in Cologne.
(GB)