RTL Hungary is now on air with the Astra suite of playout and asset management tools from Aveco. A major pan-European broadcaster, RTL has upgraded its Hungarian centre to deliver both SD and HD channels in parallel, with separate broadcast chains but common playlists, simplifying the workflow. “At the beginning of last year we decided to update our broadcast automation system,” said RTL Engineer Gabriel Marchis. “We were looking for stability and versatility. Out of a number of products on the market, it became clear that Aveco’s Astra was the one for our needs.” RTL’s own engineering team worked with Hungarian systems integrator Rexfilm to design, implement and install the platform. As well as the Aveco controlling software, the playout centre includes mirrored Grass Valley K2 video servers and a Trinix router, Miranda ImageStore and logo inserters, and a number of VTRs including a Sony LMS cart machine for mass ingest. The content archive is managed by Front Porch Digital Diva software. “With Aveco’s engineer on site, the installation and configuration of the new system went smoothly, without any major hiccups,” Marchis explained. “We finished configuring the system on time and have had no problems since.” The Aveco Astra content management system tracks all the media at RTL, retrieving files from the archive as the playlist demands, transferring them to the video server for playout. Astra also sends files to the archive, either as a result of a manual instruction or based on predefined user rules. Batch ingest automatically adds the basic metadata, and routes the content to a QA facility where metadata can be added, edited and verified to ensure the file-based workflow runs without issues. This is the fourth Aveco installation in Hungary: Astra is also on air at Story TV, Szombathely TV and Viva.
