The Information Affairs Authority’s (IAA) Bahrain Radio & Television division (BTV) is to use Masstech’s TOPAZ+XT version 7.5 to digitise and preserve all its content. The first of a kind project for the Kingdom of Bahrain will involve building a digital archive for 55 years of BTV’s broadcast content, with capacity for decades to come. Bahrain TV is currently upgrading all six of its channels to HD and the TOPAZ archive will perform the material handling to Harmonic’s Omneon playout servers under the control of Pebble Beach automation. TOPAZ’s inline high-speed transcoding (HQS) technology will bridge workflows between BTV’s content creation platforms – these include Avid Interplay, Apple FCP and Adobe Premier. Shaima Al Hamid, director of Technical Affairs at IAA said: “We chose Masstech because they have more built-in versatility to provide us with a complete solution for digital archiving, ingest, QC and metadata management. The TOPAZ system will enhance production giving our staff instant access to archived video footage with the ability to search and view low resolution proxies at their desktop. It is very important for us to preserve and protect our media assets as we invest in more channels and generate more content.” Masstech’s TOPAZ+XT, the HSM, CSM, HQS and media asset management (MAM) system, facilitates metadata entries in Arabic and English to improve programme planning, coordination, reduce costs, and enable more streamlined operations. At BTV’s facility in Manama, the installation will comprise IBM servers, a DCS3700 150TB nearline cache, a Spectra multi-frame T950 LTO-5 library, Pulsar-2 QC, 15 XT-Ingest appliances and Masstech’s DRAC redundancy – all integrated and managed by TOPAZ. Brad Redwood (pictured), VP Sales and Marketing at Masstech, said: “We are thrilled to be part of Bahrain TV’s transformation – accelerating the migration from videotape to digital archiving. In our 10th anniversary as a MAM leader, we are excited to welcome BTV to Masstech’s global family of installations. For over a decade, we have been delivering MAM solutions to leading broadcasters who value our highly skilled support services and capitalise on the full benefits of streamlined asset management. TOPAZ’s scalable open platform with interfaces to new media and business systems will support the Kingdom’s ambitious expansion plans for years to come.” www.masstech.com
