13 June 2008
Al Jazeera English has won the award for Best 24 Hour News Programme at the prestigious 48th Monte Carlo Television Festival.
Al Jazeera English beat impressive entries from BBC News, Sky News, Lisboa TV and the Phoenix Satellite Television Company to take home the award. Among the specific reports highlighted at the Festival were Nour Odeh’s groundbreaking reports from Gaza, where she brought the suffering of the Gazan people to life when she was caught in the middle of a violent street battle between Hamas and Fatah. While shooting live in Gaza, Nour and her producer Ashraf Al-Amritti lost contact with the newsroom in Doha and were forced to rely on their mobile phone to continue reporting events as they occurred. Once the live video feed returned, Nour’s cameraman, Iyad Al-Dahdouh, filmed the continued fighting while coming under RPG and small arms fire. Following the broadcast of the fighting on Al Jazeera, both sides in the Gaza battles agreed to a ceasefire.
In addition to Best 24 Hour News Programme, AJE received nominations in every news category at the awards show, including Best TV Item for James Bays’ Taliban Embedded, which was awarded a second place prize, and Best News Documentary for Tony Birtley’s Inside Myanmar The Crackdown. Commenting on the nominations, AJE’s Managing Director Tony Burman said, “I am very excited that the AJE Newshour has been recognised as the best 24 hour news programme in the world. For me, the award demonstrates the commitment of AJE’s staff to giving a voice to the voiceless, of telling vital stories that are not on the agenda of the western news networks. Whether risking their lives to cover the bloodshed in Gaza, to travel with a Taliban cell in Afghanistan or to tell the world the real story from inside Myanmar, where we are the only international broadcaster with a permanent presence, AJE employees are telling the untold story and are putting real people back at the centre of the news agenda. I am extremely proud that the world is paying attention to the hard work and dedication of the AJE staff, and each and every one of them should be congratulated for this recognition.”
12 June 2008
Pharos is establishing a sales and support operation in Singapore. The new facility will initially be situated at the New Tech Park in Lorong Chuan and will be managed by Patrick Keys. Along with co-founders Roger Heath and Spencer Rodd, Patrick was one of the original members of the Pharos team. Patrick initially worked as part of the Pharos Playtime automation software development team and is a veteran of many international Pharos projects including CNN Headline News in Atlanta and Network 7 in Australia. He also established the international support operation at Pharos’ Reading UK headquarters and has developed customer training programmes for Pharos installations including Technicolor, Viasat and Globecast. Patrick will be working to build a local Pharos sales, engineering and support team in Singapore.
“Singapore is home to some of the region’s most successful international broadcasters and playout service-providers” comments Russell Grute, Director of Marketing at Pharos. “To succeed and grow in South East Asia, many broadcasters and service providers need to work more efficiently. They face unique content management and distribution challenges to localise and promote content for their viewers across a complex region. Singapore’s supportive business environment together with its highly advanced communications infrastructure make it an ideal location for Pharos to help new customers in the region. Our new Singapore operation will provide project engineering and technical support for Pharos systems, as well as direct ongoing support to customers in the region.”
Pharos delivers better workflow management to broadcasters and service-providers in television, radio, IPTV and telecommunications. For 10 years Pharos has continually developed the unique Mediator, Playtime and Pilot desktop broadcast management solutions. Pharos workflow offers greater efficiency for library management, ingest, quality control, storage management, archival, transcoding, post-production and playout. Pharos solutions offer a next-generation platform to better manage multiformat content and enable rapid expansion in playout, presentation and publishing. Pharos software architecture, integration and support services enable disparate broadcast and IT processes to be unified across the enterprise.
11 June 2008
Radio Farda journalist Ahmad Rafat, who has reported on human rights abuses around the world for more than 30 years, has won the prestigious Ilaria Alpi prize from the Italian chapter of Reporters Sans Frontieres during a ceremony in Riccione, Italy.
The award, named after an Italian journalist who was killed along with her cameraman in Somalia in 1994, recognises courageous, investigative and fact-based reporting.
“Winning this award reinforces for me the responsibility I feel to continue reporting on human rights abuses and in defense of press freedom,” said Rafat, who lives in Rome and splits his time between Radio Farda, the Voice of America and the Italian news agency Adnkronos.
In early June Rafat made headlines when he was declared ‘persona non grata’ and denied admission to the UN Food Summit in Rome by organisers who, he believes, were acting at the request of the Iranian government. Before the summit, Rafat’s reports on Radio Farda – which broadcasts Persian-language news and information to Iran – focused on the controversy surrounding Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s trip to Italy. Rafat interviewed numerous critics of the Iranian President and exposed the reluctance of the Pope and many Italian officials to meet with Ahmadinejad. After an outcry by the international media, foreign governments, and media rights organisations, UN Food Summit organisers issued a public apology to Rafat and reinstated his credentials.
Previous recipients of the Ilaria Alpi prize include Veran Matic, Director of Serbia’s leading independent radio and television station, B-92, and Enzo Biaggi, a noted Italian journalist and political commentator.
Radio Farda is the Persian-language broadcasting service of RFE/RL that broadcasts news and information to Iran 24 hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week and can be found online at www.radiofarda.com.
10 June 2008
Combined expertise and facilities will offer international broadcasters a major gateway to and from Asia
Content management and delivery
company GlobeCast and Pacific Century Group have reached a conditional
agreement for the acquisition by GlobeCast Asia of Hong Kong-based
broadcast services company Pacific Century Matrix (HK) Limited (PCM).
When the transaction is complete, PCM will be renamed GlobeCast Hong
Kong GlobeCasts fifth office in Asia and 18th office worldwide. The
acquisition will give PCM clients access to the worldwide reach of GlobeCast,a full subsidiary of France Telecom, while retaining PCMs expertise and personnel.
GlobeCast and PCMs international roster of clients will benefit from the
companies combined resources, including two major technical hubs in
Singapore and Hong Kong. The Hong Kong teleport and MCR facility will also
be interconnected with GlobeCasts 12 other teleports and technical
operations centres around the world, as well as with the companys extensive
satellite and fibre content distribution network. The result will be an increased capacity to offer worldwide solutions for broadcasters coming to and from Asia.
GlobeCast Asia CEO, David Justin, said: The addition of PCM to the Group
will serve to dramatically increase the growth that GlobeCast has already
been seeing in Asia for the past few years. PCM comes to us with a strong
reputation and invaluable expertise, not to mention a service offering and
culture that is very compatible with our own.
Guenter Kring, PCM CEO added: PCM is delighted to join the GlobeCast
Group. We see a huge potential for developing new and beneficial services
for our combined client base, while continuing to offer the same high-quality of service that our respective customers have come to expect.
This 100% acquisition of PCM, founded in 1999, confirms GlobeCasts
continued commitment to the Asian broadcast market. In the past five years alone, GlobeCast has made significant investment in Asia, adding three new offices (Beijing, Seoul and now Hong Kong) to its portfolio, creating important partnerships to expand facilities and services, and increasing its fibre interconnection and satellite capacity in the region.
Neither the terms of the agreement nor the transaction amount were disclosed.
9 June 2008
Bloomberg Television
is the latest company to become a sponsor of the 2008 AIB Media Excellence
Awards, joining graphics company
Vizrt who announced its sponsorship in April.
Bloomberg TV is sponsoring the “most innovative technology” Award category
that will celebrate the best production or distribution technology in
international broadcasting. As a major user of sophisticated production
technology in its global bureaux and production centres, Bloomberg TV knows how
important it is that the right technological solution is in place in the
broadcasting environment.
Vizrt is sponsoring the “most creative use of graphics” category. This new
Award will recognise the most creative use of dynamic graphics in TV
storytelling, particularly in news, sport and weather.
Full information about this year’s AIB Awards can be found in the microsite
at www.aibawards.com.
Download the Awards information pack
here.
To sponsor this year’s AIB Media Excellence Awards, contact Ollie Kirkman
on +44 (0) 1727 739 184. Ollie will be pleased to explain the benefits of being
associated with the major celebration of excellence in international TV, radio
and online which includes having your brand placed in front of 25,000 media
executives, journalists, producers, editors and technologists in media companies
worldwide.
