ATG Danmon designs and integrates new newsroom and edit suites for Alaraby Tv

Alaraby Television in London has carried out a large-scale upgrade of its facilities, entrusting ATG Danmon with the design and integration of the new newsroom and several news editing suites.

Alaraby broadcasts via satellite to viewers throughout the Middle East, North Africa and Europe, as well as globally via cable and online.

“News and documentary programmes form a core part of our output,” comments Ali Husseini, director of broadcast operations & visuals at Alaraby. “Key objectives were to advance our news reporting, ingest, production and playout systems to latest-generation workflow, allowing staff at our headquarters and around the world to operate with maximum efficiency and creativity as a unified team. Our legacy infrastructure remained active until the new system was fully commissioned so that editors and their production colleagues could transition as easily as possible.”

“Alaraby selected us to design, engineer and integrate a complete system from content acquisition right through to presentation,” adds ATG Danmon project manager Howard Dixon. “The front end comprises 12 channels of news ingest capturing to a dedicated server with proxy file-generation capability. This feeds through to a 75-client news production platform with full asset management resources, 120 terabytes of production storage and cloud-connected browsing.

Playout

Studio playout is fully automated and includes a multichannel MPEG gallery playout server. The graphics system provides a range of image generation capabilities including a scrolling text news ticker, virtual studio generation plus a video wall feed. We were also commissioned to upgrade eight craft edit suites, replacing a third-party installation with latest-generation Avid editors, plus network switching and transcoding.”

ATG Danmon worked across the production control gallery and master control room, providing cabling, racks and interfaces where necessary. A new data centre was equipped which could be operated alongside the channel’s existing data centre during the transition to the new system. This included designing and integrating KVM control interfaces allowing newsroom and edit suite operators to switch between the legacy and latest-generation systems.

“As is normal on projects of this kind, we partnered closely with Alaraby’s management team and studio staff to ensure that full broadcast continuity was maintained throughout the entire process of upgrading,” adds ATG Danmon managing director Russell Peirson-Haggar. “Programme rehearsal, live presentation, post production and playout all proceeded as normal throughout the upgrade. Much of the installation work was performed at night so that studio operation could proceed without disturbance. Precautions were also taken to ensure Covid-19 safeguarding.”