Pebble migrated Bahrain TV’s legacy playout system to their modern Integrated Channel and Broadcast Automation systems, placing the MI’s six TV channels in line for an IP-based future.
Bahrain TV’s bouquet of six channels is the television arm of the Ministry of Information (MI) Kingdom of Bahrain, the nation’s only public broadcaster, based in the Bahraini capital, Manama. Bahrain TV is also a long-term Pebble customer, and had been running their channels on a Pebble Neptune system for many years. Recently, working alongside systems integrator First Gulf Company, a team from Pebble has migrated the legacy system over to the current, updated Integrated Channel and Broadcast Automation systems.
Bahrain TV’s aim is to place the MI’s six TV channels in position for an IP-based future. Because the Integrated Channel can operate using any combination of SDI, ST 2022-6, ST 2110 or transport stream, their broadcast operations can be fully migrated to IP at a pace that suits their business.
The system uses Pebble’s Enterprise Automation to control the Integrated Channel playout, combined with third-party server, mixer and routing devices, in a single integrated system. The playout component can handle six channels at a time. It controls six main and six protection (backup) servers, six mixers and six graphics engines. On ingest, it manages six simultaneous feeds per server, delivering parallel ingest to the main and backup servers. The system includes playlist preparation tools and playlist preview capabilities, including Junction preview.
Junction previewing is used to review transitions (or junctions) between primary events in a transmission list. When the user selects a series of events to review, the event junctions are then automatically inserted into a preview playlist. Similar to a Transmission Playlist, which controls the devices that broadcast content to air, the Preview Playlist controls those devices used for previewing content. By selecting a contiguous block of events in a Transmission Playlist and copying it into a Preview Playlist, the user can preview any scheduled media.
The system also manages media movement within Bahrain TV’s storage system, automating file transfers between video servers, nearline storage and the LTO Archive. In all cases, care had to be taken to integrate the Pebble systems directly with components from preferred vendors in the Bahrain TV channel workflow. Also, the integration team needed to ensure that no disruption to viewers occurred during the precise process of swapping the individual components.
Pebble’s team commented, “IP is coming, here as elsewhere in the world, and the ST-2110 capabilities that Bahrain TV have specified will make sure it can adapt and evolve its services to the Bahraini people over the coming years.” www.pebble.tv
