India’s English news channel NDTV 24×7 will use Amagi’s STORM regionalisation platform to insert regional ads in the Middle East on the channel’s Asia-Pacific satellite feed.
“NDTV, which is India’s premier English news channel, is expanding its viewership base among the vast expatriate population in the Middle East,” explained Dinesh Singh (pictured), CTO of NDTV. “We were looking for ways to provide local advertisers in the region access to our clearly segmented viewership. Post evaluation of multiple vendor platforms, Amagi’s Ad-insertion solution emerged as the perfect choice as it allowed us to regionalise our channel in the Middle East without creating new, expensive satellite feeds.”
KA Srinivasan, co-founder of Amagi, added, “Content regionalisation and monetisation have been a growing need for TV networks globally. Amagi’s STORM IRD series integrates ad and content insertion capability with traditional IRD functionality thereby making it easy for TV networks to regionalise their satellite feeds. Amagi’s STORM platform is deployed across more than 4,000 headends and is a time-tested and reliable solution. We are excited to have India’s leading news network NDTV on board as our valued client.”
For NDTV, Amagi inserts unique content watermarks on advertisements that need to be replaced in the Middle East. These watermarked content assets are transmitted over the satellite as per the channel playlist. The local ads that need to be played out only in the Middle East region and associated local playlists are transmitted through a trickle satellite bandwidth to be stored in Amagi’s STORMLite IRDs deployed at NDTV’s headends in the region.
Prashant Rawat, head of Broadcast Operations for NDTV, commented: “For a live news channel such as ours, the Amagi watermark triggers turned out to be a much more reliable content trigger mechanism than SCTE-35 and DTMTF cue-tones. With Amagi, we monetised our channel in the Middle East including the Aston bands without affecting existing workflow and systems. The solution was easy to implement and we are very satisfied with the final outcome. The Ad-insertions have been flawless and we are confident that the regional advertisers will benefit from geo-targeting.”
