22 April 2009
The father of Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi says an Iranian court has convicted her of espionage and sentenced her to a lengthy prison term.
Speaking from Tehran, Reza Saberi told RFE/RL’s Radio Farda that his daughter was sentenced to eight years in prison.
He said that he was not allowed into the court, but the family’s lawyer was present with the defendant to hear the verdict on April 18.
“They asked Roxana to sign the verdict, but she refused and said that she does not accept the verdict,” Saberi said. “We are planning to appeal the case.”
Saberi, 31, was arrested in Tehran in January.
Saberi has said she had been arrested for buying alcohol — which is forbidden in the Islamic republic. She was then accused of working without press credentials, but was later charged with spying for the United States.
The trial began on April 13 and was held behind closed doors at a Revolutionary Court.
Reza Saberi said he still hopes the Iranian judiciary will review his daughter’s case and overturn the verdict.
“I hope they will change the verdict and show some degree of fairness and justice. My daughter is innocent, but she has spent almost three months in jail,” Reza Saberi said.
“They put her in jail instead of appreciating what she was doing. She came here [to Iran] to do research on Iran’s history, culture, literature, and the people, but she ended up in jail.”
The government has arrested several Iranian-Americans in the past few years, citing alleged attempts to overthrow its Islamic government. But they were eventually released from prison.
The United States has called for Saberi’s release, dismissing the allegations against her. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton issued a statement on April 18 saying she was “deeply disappointed by the reported sentencing.”
Following the verdict, the Paris-based watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) “firmly” condemned the sentence, saying the conviction was “unjust.”
In a recent interview with RFE/RL, RSF’s Iran researcher, Reza Moini, said the accusations were “baseless.”
“The truth is that no court has been able to prove the spying charges that have been brought not only against Roxana Saberi, but against a number of journalists who since 2000 have been charged with espionage,” Moini said.
“We believe that the charges are baseless and the way the court (trial) was held behind closed doors indicates this,” Moini continued. “Also, the fact that no evidence in the case was provided to journalists and independent observers.”
Saberi has worked as a freelance reporter for several Western news organizations including the U.S. public broadcaster, National Public Radio, and the BBC.
Moini pointed out that seven journalists and two bloggers are currently in jail in Iran. Three of them — Adnan Hassanpur, Mohammad Sadigh Kabudvand, and Mohammad Hassan Falahizadeh — were sentenced to heavy prison terms on the same espionage charge as Saberi.
“Iran is the biggest prison for journalists in the Middle East and freedom of press does not exist in Iran,” Moini said. “Journalists are in a way under a Damocles’ sword of baseless accusations that have nothing to do with their journalistic activities.”
United States severed diplomatic relations with Iran after its 1979 Islamic Revolution and the hostage taking of U.S. diplomats in Iran.
Saberi’s prison sentence could have a negative impact on U.S.-Iran ties. It comes as U.S. President Barack Obama has promised to engage Iran after some 30 years of strained relations.
Iranian officials have reacted by saying that they want to see a change in U.S. actions and not just words.
On April 15, President Mahmud Ahmadinejad said Iran was preparing new proposals aimed at breaking an impasse with the West over its nuclear program.
Saberi is seen by some as a victim of the reluctance by Iranian hard-liners to move towards improving relations with the United States, while others believe Tehran might want to use her as a bargaining chip for its citizens that are in U.S. detention.
22 April 2009
VT Communications (VTC) in partnership with the BBC World Service has won the prestigious Team of the Year – Professional and Support Services at the BBC Global News Reith Awards.
The partnership between the two organisations was rewarded for its dedication and commitment in the re-engineering of the BBC World Services Control Room and establishing a new Network Operations Centre (NOC) within timescales whilst maintaining high levels of service availability. This was the first time an external supplier has won an award at this event.
These internal awards celebrate excellence, innovation and creativity across BBC Global News. Sir David Attenborough presented the award at a ceremony in London on 11 March.
BBC World Service needed to meet the growing needs of its global audience of 182 million listeners, and prepare for its delivery of its first television services in Arabic and Persian.
At the same time, VTC was looking for an opportunity to broaden its service offering to a wider range of broadcast platforms and invested in a state-of-the-art Media Management Centre (MMC) in London.
VTCs strong heritage of connecting broadcasters with their global audiences, and its long term relationship with the BBC World Service meant that the success of each project was reliant on a partnership approach to deliver successful results.
Throughout 2008, the companies worked together to implement the technological, operational and structural changes required. Despite the physical disruption, service availability reached its highest ever level never less than 99.99%.
The BBC NOC is now jointly staffed by a team of dedicated BBC Duty Operations Managers with round-the-clock support from highly-trained VTC Operational and Broadcast Support teams, providing the best ever programme availability to the BBC World Service audience.
Mike Cronk, Controller Future Media, Technology & Distribution at BBC Global News, said: This was the largest re-engineering of the BBC Control Room in 15 years and was only possible through the close collaboration of the BBC and VT teams. Its been a period of huge change with the Network Operations centre now handling BBC World Service Arabic TV and Persian TV services. The new technology coupled with the way the teams are now working means output performance is at an all time high.
Bryan Coombes, Director of Broadcast at VT Communications, said: At VTC we work in partnership with broadcasters to manage their current needs, and plan together for the future. This project is a great example of how effective the partnership is with the BBC World Service and how it delivers mutually beneficial results. We were able to provide staff to the BBC to allow for peak workload periods, training, leave and other ad hoc projects, something that could only have succeeded with complete dedication on both sides.
14 April 2009
Wohler Technologies Inc. announced that Wohler Mobile, packed with state-of-the-art processing and monitoring products, will be making a stop on the 2009 NAB Show floor. Proudly adorned in Wohler blue, the 22-foot-long trailer demonstrates how easily Wohler products provide key functionality even in the most space-constrained production applications.
“Wohler Mobile provides guests with a hands-on demonstration of how our monitoring products support real-world workflows tailored to the current and future demands of production, acquisition, live broadcast, distribution, and transmission,” said Kim Templeman-Holmes, vice president of global sales and marketing at Wohler. “Wohler gear is built to provide excellent performance in compact, cost-effective designs, and Wohler Mobile highlights the value and convenience provided by our systems in mission-critical monitoring applications.”
Wohler Mobile’s array of products includes intuitive touch-screen systems that simplify video monitoring and routing while providing key functional enhancements, versatile HD monitors for all variety of signal types, and analog and digital audio monitoring systems and level meters that together accommodate virtually every audio input type.
Seven different systems from the robust yet affordable RM LCD video monitoring series are represented in the mobile truck, providing high-quality confidence monitoring of HD/SD-SDI and composite video in configurations featuring two to four widescreen displays ranging from 3.5 inches to 9 inches in size.
Among the Dolby®-capable systems in the trailer are Wohler’s AMP2-E8MDA multiformat audio monitor a 2-RU system capable of monitoring audio from Dolby E, Dolby Digital (AC-3), HD-SDI, SD-SDI, AES/EBU, and analog signal sources and the 2-RU VAMP AC-3/M, a high-resolution color video and stereo audio monitor designed specifically for simultaneous monitoring of HD/SD-SDI digital video and AC-3/Dolby Digital or AES/EBU digital audio, providing the six digital audio channels associated with ATSC/DVB programming. The 2-RU eight-channel E MON-1/M will provide decoding, processing, and monitoring of Dolby E, Dolby Digital, HD-SDI, SD-SDI, and AES/EBU audio signals.
The popular AMP2-16MSDI has been installed in Wohler Mobile to provide instantaneous display for up to 16 channels of embedded audio within a single multirate HD/SD-SDI signal. Following its debut on the NAB show floor, the AMP1-16-3G will tour America for the first time. This model comes complete with HD/SD-SDI and AES inputs/outputs across 16 channels complemented with a video display, all in a compact 1-RU package.
Wohler’s 1-RU AMP1-S8MDA multiformat audio monitor, also integrated into the trailer, gives operators the convenience of processing and monitoring 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. The VMDA-SUM8 analog/digital summing audio monitor will support eight audio channels, as opposed to the usual four or six, and allow operators to create a small eight-channel mix down into one headset.
Highlighting the robust performance of Wohler’s extraordinarily compact monitoring products, the 1-RU VMMDA-1 audio monitor provides stereo monitoring with fidelity exceeding that of ordinary monitors of equal size.
Finally, the 1-RU VMQ-4 audio monitor will provide simultaneous monitoring of four audio sources on four analog inputs with “voice-quality” fidelity. Featuring level meters with as many as 160 segments, units in the LM Series provide configurable audio metering for analog and digital sources.
Also showcased within Wohler Mobile is the company’s unique 3-RU Touch-it Digital, which features dual 7-inch high-resolution color LCD displays. The left touch screen display is configured to display 16 thumbnail images, and when one of these images is touched, the corresponding video source appears full-size on the right monitor and its HD/SD-SDI source signal is updated as the output signal to feed video displays or other devices.
Wohler Mobile also will be equipped with AJA XENA video capture and playback cards, video servers from 360 Systems, an HD-SDI router from Sierra Video, equipment racks from Middle Atlantic Products, and a black burst generator from Horita.
Wohler Mobile made its trade show debut at the Government Video Expo 2008 in Washington, D.C. Immediately following NAB 2009, Wohler Mobile will tour the U.S. for 10 weeks commencing in Burbank, Calif., and concluding in Orlando, Fla. Please see the Wohler Mobile tour schedule below or visit www.wohler.com/tour.aspx for more information.
14 April 2009
With one of the highest concentrations of RED cameras in the country, Nashvilles production community has been graced with the ability to shoot with a cost effective, high quality, film-like camera on a digital format. The challenge has been in the postproduction. Filmworkers response to this technology-inspired chaos has been to add new equipment, new software, and professional expertise. By working closely with Quantel, the manufacturer of high-end visual effects and editing systems for film and television, Filmworkers can now move productions shot on the RED camera can through postproduction with efficient, high quality, multi-layer editing, and an impressive 4:4:4 RGB color space capability.
The Quantel eQ is a game-changer that gives us the competitive edge, says Jim Harvath, Chief Engineer at The Filmworkers Club. Were the only postproduction facility in town that can offer this level of RED multi-layer edit conforming. We can hit the tight deadlines and not compromise on the quality captured by the RED camera.
One of the biggest advantages is the eQs ability to conform a multi-layer Final Cut project seamlessly from native .r3d files. This new development simplifies postproduction of RED projects as it eliminates the need to convert material before finishing or color correction can begin – cutting the conform time by about 75 percent. The color corrector is fed 4:4:4 RGB, the largest spectrum available in the HDTV arena, and maintains this quality all the way through finishing edit and even deliverables which are available on 4:4:4 HDCAM SR tape. Real time color correction is performed in their state-of-the-art DaVinci 2K Plus by renowned colorist, Rodney Williams.
Everyone needs help navigating through the latest technology and all the choices it brings, says Reid Brody, Vice President and co-founder of Filmworkers. Were taking our role into the digital age so our clients can shoot on any format. Whether its the newest in digital like the RED camera, or the beauty of film, including three-perf 35mm and super 16mm, we make sure that theyll always get the most efficient, high quality postproduction.
Quantel released the RED conform and import for the eQ systems in November 2008, just in time for Filmworkers to finish the RASCAL FLATTS Ill be home for Christmas music video.
2 April 2009
Spanish private television broadcaster Telecinco, which like most media groups is struggling with falling advertising revenues due to the economic slowdown, is studying a merger with another broadcaster.
Another Spanish television broadcaster, La Sexta, also said it was open to a tie-up due to the dire advertising market.
Earlier this year, the Socialist government of Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero passed a law which eliminated a 5.0 percent limit on cross shareholdings at TV broadcasters in a move intended to ease sector mergers.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s holding company Fininvest holds a 50 percent stake in Telecinco, which started broadcasting in 1990 as one of the first three private television channels in Spain. Telecinco was the market leader in terms of audience share in Spain in 2008 for the fifth year in a row but its ratings have slipped this year due to the rise of younger channels and a recovery by state broadcaster TVE.
2 April 2009
Radio Netherlands Worldwide wants to expand and intensify its collaborations with foreign media partners in the next few years.
Cooperation and the exchange of content, in the form of text, audio and video, fits into the stations multimedia policy. Visual content, particularly web video, will assume an increasingly prominent role. More intensive cooperation with international media offers a larger international audience and the opportunity to share its journalists specialist knowledge with third parties, as it did yesterday at the Afghanistan summit in The Hague.
Jan Hoek, General Director of RNW, says: The collaborations with stations like al-Jazeera and Indonesias Metro TV during the Afghanistan summit was highly successful. We will looking to see whether we can give this kind of cooperation a structural basis.
The collaboration with METRO TV, on eof the biggest television stations in Indonesia, meant that millions of Indonesians were well informed about the Afghanistan conference. Apart from METRO TV en al-Jazeera, Radio Sonora Jakarta, which has ten stations in Indonesia, also took its news and reports from RNWs specialists.
Jan Hoek: The potential is enormous. In the United States and Latin America, for instance, we reach millions of people through our partner stations media networks.
