26 November 2008
In a new exchange agreement, the International News Safety Institute,
INSI, and the Association for
International Broadcasting have become members of each other’s organisations.
The AIB has worked with INSI since the Institute was founded, providing
promotion and publicity for the news safety organisation. Most recently, the AIB
and INSI presented a joint award to Sami Al Haj, the Al Jazeera cameraman who
was arrested by US forces seven years ago and held without trial in Guantanamo
Bay until earlier this year.
Commenting on the new agreement, AIB CEO Simon Spanswick said "News safety is
of paramount importance to AIB members who provide international and regional
news services. We’re delighted to be able to formalise the co-operative
arrangements we have with INSI and we look forward to a closer working
relationship."
INSI is supported by many international news gathering organisations, and
provides safety training to journalists around the world.
25 November 2008
Sport TV, Portugals leading sports broadcaster, has just placed an order for an Enterprise sQ server system to enable it upgrade its operations to HD. Sport TV produces four premium sports channels; three are distributed via cable, DTH and IPTV platforms in Portugal and one by DTH in all Sub-Saharan Africa. All ingest and editing of the HD programs and promos will be carried out entirely within the new Enterprise sQ system. The order marks the first major move in the Portuguese market towards native HD broadcast production.
The new system will comprise a four port sQ 800 server and will have two eQ effects editors integrated in the system. Sport TV already carries out all of its news production on its existing SD Enterprise sQ system.
This is the first step of the planned migration of all our production facilities to HD, in this case made easy by the fact that we can keep the existing Quantel workflow and editing tools, said José M. Mourão, Sport TVs Technical and Operations Director.
The system was ordered through Ibertelco, Quantels representative in Portugal. We are very happy with this first order for an HD system because it shows that the original system installed to support just one SD channel grew up and it is now both a technical platform and a human structure able to broadcast four independent channels, which soon will become five, said João Pessanha, Ibertelcos Managing Director. Sport TV is a winning story and Ibertelco is proud to be part of that success.
19 November 2008
Quantel has won a 2008 Hollywood Post Alliance Engineering Excellence Award for its Pablo Stereoscopic 3D system. The HPA Engineering Excellence Awards honor outstanding new technologies representing a significant step forward for the post production industry. The awards were presented November 6th at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles.
Its an honor to win the HPA award for our Stereo3D technology, said Mark Horton, Quantels Strategic Marketing Manager, who received the Award on behalf of Quantel. We know Stereo3D provides a great opportunity for everyone in our industry and the HPA membership is a leading part of this new wave. Receiving the HPA award last year for Genetic Engineering gave a tremendous boost to the product in the market and also to the Quantel engineers that developed it. This years award will have the same effect and will help to drive the market forward into a new and exciting era.
Quantels Stereoscopic 3D system for Pablo provides the first true, real-time, end-to-end post process for stereoscopic 3D films. The system overcomes the many challenges that have hindered stereoscopic 3D post production in the past. It offers the ability to play out and process two streams of synchronous, high resolution media simultaneously without rendering, making the conforming of 3D media almost as quick and simple as conforming conventional 2-D media. The system has been embraced by leading post production facilities worldwide, including FotoKem, PlasterCITY Digital Post, Stereoscope, Gradient Effects, Modern VideoFilm, 3ality Digital and Pace in the USA and also at post houses in London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Paris and other major post centers around the world.
In announcing the awards, HPA President Leon Silverman noted that creativity comes in many forms. It is sometimes easy to see the creative hand and impact on screen, but the creative impact of what brings content to screens is not always understood or celebrated, he said. The tools, technology and infrastructure of our increasingly technically complex industry help to push the boundaries of creative expression. These Engineering Excellence Awards recipients have all demonstrated a profound insight into how technology so elegantly and transparently fuels creativity and continues to allow the post production industry to demonstrate the deep value it adds to content creation.
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.
