Following the successful implementation of scalable and hardware-independent archive and MAM solutions from Cinegy for its library, Turkish broadcaster Dogan TV has now created a tapeless production workflow based on a standard office IP network, including newsroom, ingest, and playout automation services.
“As the time came to transition from SD SDI to HD SDI, we calculated the costs for the transformation, anticipated future workflow, and decided to migrate to an IP infrastructure that was seen as cost effective, less cumbersome, and more scalable,” explains Hasan Kiragi, director of broadcast operations at Dogan TV Holding.
He says the Dogan and Cinegy teams joined forces to explore the principles and functionality of the IP-based live broadcast solution. As a result, by the end of 2015, Dogan TV finished its transition to a full IP-based broadcasting and production workflow with only remnants of SDI in its studios. At that time, Dogan TV was the only national broadcaster in the world whose broadcasting and production workflows were fully IP operated.
Kiragi goes on to explain that the station’s workflows involving recording, editing, archiving, playout, live signalling, graphics and insertion, and offline editing of the news programme are all based on Cinegy and IP technologies.
“We have 440 concurrent users of Cinegy Desktops and about 800 users in total. We have a 5PB archive and 260TB of storage for production purposes. Our 25 ingest stations enable us to work with live records, IP streams and the remains of SDI signals. There are about 100 playout servers in our master control rooms for our main and satellite channels.”
On the production site, Dogan TV has around 30 studio playout servers for the 11 studio production locations, while 50 IP multicast gateways convert SDI signals to IP and IP to SDI. “We also have Cinegy IP-tools to manage, monitor and control all IP-streams in our workflow.”
In addition, the associated Dogan News Agency and D Productions – one of the leading production companies in Turkey – uses Cinegy IP tools to simultaneously record multiple cameras from the same production studio.
“We have had a very innovative and productive partnership with Cinegy for more than 12 years,” Kiragi says. “The Cinegy solution means that we do not have dependency on any proprietary hardware and format technology. It provides freedom to use any standard IT equipment and a flexible and scalable system design. There are improvements regarding technical layouts that give us the potential for cost-effective and flexible design. We do not have to worry about live signals, neither as an input port number nor output port number for the routing. Nor do we have to lay down thousands of metres of video cables for live signals. We can carry hundreds of live video signals on a single 10gbps network port.”
