SGT expands into the Middle East

SGT has won its first major contract in the Middle East, specifically in Qatar, which will be the home country of PYC (Panarabic Youth Channel), a new television channel for young Arabic people all over the world.
PYC will begin broadcasting in the Middle East as well as Northern Africa and Europe in early 2005. Later, viewers in the United States will also be able to receive the channel.
The project is being carried out by Salam Technical Services as Prime Contractor. Salam Technical Services is a prominent System Integrator in the Middle East based in Qatar and United Arab Emirates. Its references include prestigious broadcasters like MBC, Alarabia and Al Jazeera, for which Salam Technical Services has created several channels (sports, news, and documentaries).
From a technical point of view, this new installation, to be located in Doha, will be entirely digital — no videotapes will enter into the workflow. The main technical equipment will be Leitch video servers, as well as Avid, Leitch and Quantel Editing and Graphic stations.
All the operators will use SGT products, because the selected solution is based entirely on SGT software: Traffic Management for handling the choice programs and their scheduling, Media Manager for the global management of media in the workflow, and Transmission Management for the playout of the programmes.
SGT is in fact one of very few suppliers in the world capable of delivering complete broadcast software solutions with such a high functional level. Its products offer the users the benefit of a totally fluid workflow and perfect mutualisation of information.
The PYC project will take advantage of many specific features of SGT's products, including totally automated mass digitisation, secure transmission in Active/Passive mode, the management of news and production studios, browsing in Windows Media 9 (WM9) format, content management on different SANs and global system supervision.
A new Media Manager module, Storyboarding, will be used by PYC's archivists to keep detailed records of the content of all media before archiving on a Storagetek cart machine.
(GB/SP)