19 November 2008
Forbes Arabia has rated Al Jazeera as the leading Arab brand for 2008 – the second consecutive time since 2006. Forbes Arabia used the Brand Goodwill index to measure brand strength among 82 leading brands in the region from a range of categories that included media, communications, transport, fashion, food, cosmetics, real estate, and hotels. Forbes commissioned TNS Middle East and Africa to poll the opinions of 1200 participants from Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Morocco, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Yemen. Participants were randomly exposed to the selected brands to see how familiar those brands were to them and asked a number of questions to check their loyalty to these brands; the results were then analyzed based on the strength of the participants’ relationship to these brands. Al Jazeeras brand ranked first in the tough competition where five out of the first ten leading brands were media organizations.
19 November 2008
Al Jazeera Network announced the opening of a Commercial Sales office in Kuala Lumpur to be launched in Q1 2009 to focus on serving the Asia Pacific market. The office and existing commercial division will help advertisers and business partners in the region capitalize on Al Jazeera’s global reach and international brand.
“This is an important stepping stone for our commercial efforts in the region as we begin to extend our global brand. While we remain focused on bringing ground-breaking news to the world, we are venturing and expanding into new commercial areas. The Al Jazeera family of channels which now includes Al Jazeera Satellite Channel, Al Jazeera English, six Sports Channels and Al Jazeera Documentary gives extensive market reach and advertising value for our partners” said Dr. Al-Horr. “The aim of the Commercial Office in Kuala Lumpu r will be to get closer to our Asia Pacific partners beginning with introductory offers for new sponsors and potential partners for 2009 onwards.”
Al Jazeera English launched in 2006, has been making steady progress in the region with developments this year in Hong Kong, Singapore, Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam, building on top of existing reach and strong market presence in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Macau and free-to-air Asia-wide footprint on AsiaSat3. Al Jazeera English is currently available to over 130 million households worldwide, including 25 million across Asia Pacific.
19 November 2008
PANORAMAdtv, the video products division of Wohler Technologies Inc., today announced that Australia’s Global Television is installing Wohler audio and video monitoring equipment in two new state-of-the-art HD OB trucks. Wohler’s compact HD/SD monitoring solutions will simplify high-resolution audio and video monitoring of Global Television’s programming, which includes many of the country’s highest profile reality, entertainment, and sports programs.
“As the first units in Australia to deploy 3Gb/s ready infrastructure, our new HD trucks represent leading-edge broadcast technologies,” said Terry Manley, chief engineer at Global Television. “The Wohler equipment is an optimal fit, enabling robust and flexible monitoring of digital audio and high-resolution video while taking up very little space in our truck. Space, power, and weight savings are critical to cost-effective mobile production, and Wohler’s monitoring solutions meet all these requirements while offering the premium performance our clients demand in HD production.”
The extensive installation of Wohler gear within the Global Television OB trucks includes MON series rackmount LCD HD/SD video monitors, along with Wohler’s digital audio monitoring bridges for HD/SD video and digital audio monitoring. The compact yet flexible design of Wohler’s MON high-resolution display monitors is ideal for confidence monitoring of multiple video feeds in mobile applications where space is at a premium.
The MON4-2W/HR features four side-by-side 4.3-inch wide-format LCD panels, each with dedicated recessed controls for contrast and brightness, native 16:9 aspect ratio, and selection between 16:9 and 4:3 aspect ratios for SD-SDI signals, as well as tally indicators and independent power and input termination switches. Each LCD is mounted in a cylinder and thus may be rotated approximately ±30 degrees in the vertical plane for optimum operator viewing angles.
A total of nine MON4-2W/HR HD/SD rackmount LCD video monitors are being installed in each truck, providing 36 individual widescreen displays in just 18 RU. These units will support the bulk of Global Television’s video monitoring activity. Seven MON1-T/7W-HR 7-inch high-resolution HD/SD monitors will be mounted adjacent to Tektronix Waveform Monitors in a Tektronix tub to facilitate detailed signal analysis.
Each OB truck will be equipped with 14 of Wohler’s AMP1-S8MDA HD/SD embedded audio monitoring bridges and a single E MON-1/M audio bridge with built in Dolby® E decoding. The AMP1-S8MDA is a complete audio monitoring solution capable of monitoring audio from HD-SDI, SD-SDI, AES/EBU, and analog signal sources. The 1RU system processes and monitors up to eight channels from an HD-SDI or SD-SDI bit stream, two sets of four AES/EBU signal pairs (balanced and unbalanced), or eight balanced analog channels. Eight high-resolution 26-segment tricolor LED bar-graph audio-level meters provide accurate and instantaneous visual level monitoring at a glance.
Sydney-based Quinto Communications supplied the Wohler gear for Global Television. “This will be the largest deployment of Wohler monitoring equipment in an OB environment within Australia,” said Tom Pavicic, general manager of Quinto Communications.
The first of the two HD OB units will hit the road by the end of 2008, and the second will be completed in early 2009.
19 November 2008
Autocue, the leading provider of teleprompting and newsroom automation solutions, features new prompting software developments at IBC to cater for the growing number of customers working on Windows Vista and Mac operating platforms.
Autocues in-house software development team has responded to increasing requests from customers of its Professional and Starter ranges for compatibility with Windows Vista and Mac operating systems. QPro and QStart, the prompting software for the respective ranges, are now fully tested and compatible with these operating systems including Macs running Windows-emulating software.
According to Autocue CEO Hyman, Mac and Vista have become much more prominent over the last year. A major benefit of having a large in-house software development team is that we can respond quickly to our changing customer needs.
The upgrade to the new version of the software will be offered at a greatly reduced cost to existing customers, and available via a single download from the website.
19 November 2008
Autocue, the leading provider of teleprompting and newsroom automation solutions, will launch a major development of QMaster/ QBox IP-based prompting solution, at IBC in response to demand from Middle Eastern and Asian customers.
CEO Hyman says Autocue have seen massive growth in the last 18 months in the Middle East and Asia, particularly the Indian sub-continent. Hyman adds, Until now, we have only been able to offer our legacy software product based on the traditional PCI card – the technology still used by our competitors. The demand for a version of QMaster/ QBox that works with complex languages is clear and we have a list of customers waiting to upgrade as soon as its ready.
Autocue will use IBC 2008 to launch Arabic and Hindi language handling, but the core of the development work for these languages mean that all other complex languages will follow with minimal new development work.
Hyman continues, Weve had incredible success in launching QMaster/ QBox to our European language customers, who have fully embraced its unique benefits such as remote prompting and in-built resilience. The new language handling provides us with clear product differentiation in the biggest growth markets of the Middle East and Asia.
