Greenland’s national broadcaster Kalaallit Nunaata Radiao (KNR) has completed the ground-up technical re-build of its broadcast facility in the capital Nuuk. KNR, which broadcasts one TV station and one radio station, hired Denmark’s AVIT-Systems to act as systems integrator and to select the best technology for its requirements, writes Fergal Ringrose.
Peter Sperling, Sales Manager with AVIT-Systems, explains, “The project was to build a complete turnkey project for KNR. We did not re-use anything. There were two key reasons why they initiated this project: they had a TV station built approximately 20 years ago and the equipment had reached the end of its life; secondly, they wanted to move to a digital platform.”
KNR has installed SysMedia’s PLASMA teletext content management system and WinCAPS subtitling technology. Much of KNR’s content is supplied in Danish (hence needing subtitling into the local Greenlandic language) from Danmarks Radio (DR), which also operates an extensive SysMedia subtitling system.
A similar situation exists with KNR’s teletext service. KNR uses a mixture of feeds, including news feeds, for its teletext output – and also accepts teletext pages from DR. One of the reasons that SysMedia’s PLASMA system was selected, explains Sperling, is because it can accept pages from a wide variety of sources and reproduce them exactly as required.
He adds, “Although Greenland is considered to be at the edge of the world, KNR wanted to become a truly modern broadcaster. While many broadcasters aim for a completely digital system, not that many of them truly achieve it. AVIT-Systems selected SysMedia because we believe that its solutions show real ‘digital thinking’ with a full appreciation of what is required.”
