Dalet, a provider of solutions and services for broadcasters and content professionals, announced that Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) is significantly expanding the portion of its media operations powered by the Dalet Galaxy Media Asset Management (MAM) and Orchestration platform. The new implementation will facilitate production and distribution of news, sports, radio programs in multiple languages and music content across the broadcaster’s TV, radio and digital platforms. The new deployment will bolster SBS’s production capability prior to the 2018 FIFA World Cup.
Building on the successful integration of dozens of systems and automation of several program management workflows under a unified Dalet Galaxy environment, the expanded installation will now encompass news and sports production as well as the full radio automation for SBS music channels. This will deliver production content to three TV channels, eight radio channels (music and talk show), the SBS website and online apps. SBS’s radio programming is produced in more than 70 languages, making it the most linguistically diverse broadcaster globally. In addition to the 2018 FIFA Football World Cup, the production of other sporting events that will be facilitated by the new integration include tier-one events such as the Tour de France and English Premiere League.
SBS’ chief technology officer Noel Leslie, said, “Following the first phase of our strategic move to streamline our programming content under the management of a single MAM platform, we embarked on phase two in full confidence of our partnership with Dalet. SBS and Dalet teams have worked collaboratively on the software commissioning and the system integration for this project. Change management is also extremely important to us at SBS, and we have made it core to our strategy to involve key stakeholders across the chain and across our geographically spread operation right from the start of the process.”
The system will be deployed across four sites including SBS headquarters in Sydney, connected production operation in Melbourne, a third system in Canberra, and a Business Continuity (BC) / Disaster Recovery (DR) site also in Sydney.
Specifically, Dalet will unify content preparation, production and ingest at two TV studios and eight radio studios in Sydney and an additional eight radio studios in Melbourne, bringing together up to 300 simultaneous users working with the system. Video ingest for 50 channels spread across the country, alongside multiple channels of audio ingest, will be centrally managed under the control of Dalet. The Dalet AmberFin media processing platform will assist with transcoding as required.
Dalet On-the-Go will also be available to connect journalists in the field directly to the central Dalet Galaxy platform. Dalet OneCut is provided for desktop editing and remote editing at the Canberra studios. Industry-standard, BPMN 2.0-compliant Dalet Workflow Engine automates multi-platform publishing, including social media workflows, as well as archiving operations.
“There are many tangible benefits SBS will receive by further standardizing production under one unified environment; lower TCO, optimized support and training costs, fewer systems to integrate – all thanks to the powerful agility and extensibility of the Dalet Galaxy platform,” said Raoul Cospen, Dalet product manager. “Using the full scope of the Dalet platform, SBS is able to unite and streamline its content collaboration across geographically diverse SBS departments, and orchestrate the program acquisition, preparation and distribution workflows.”
The Dalet Galaxy open APIs are used for a variety of interfaces with third parties including music scheduling system Power Gold and Adobe® Premiere® Pro CC for craft editing across the three production sites, and Opta Sports data feeds. Integrations with Dell EMC® Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS™) provide SBS teams with a single user interface to easily access and manage content. Further integrations facilitated by Dalet include Ross Overdrive in SBS’s automated production studio, Ross Expression for graphics and content management system Drupal. Integrations with social media networks Facebook, Twitter and YouTube make this installation a complete end-to-end solution for SBS to address effectively their audiences across all available platforms.
