Ten Sports, part of the Zee Entertainment Group, has completed a major broadcast facility upgrade using technology from Imagine Communications to enable integrated workflow and better efficiency.
Claiming to be the leading sports network in Asia, Ten Sports operates five pay-TV channels across 169 countries and owns the long-term broadcast rights for cricket boards in South Africa, Zimbabwe, West Indies, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Its new broadcast facility, recently relocated from the UAE to India, relies on an end-to-end sports production and playout solution for the production and distribution of its entire family of channels.
Imagine says that the upgrade has enabled Ten Sports to optimise workflow across the network, from ingest to playout, including all media management, branding and master control.
"Our existing IT infrastructure was dated and consisted of independent islands of storage, which lacked fast throughput — slowing the entire ingest to playout process," said Sanjeev Bhargava, vice president – engineering, Ten Sports. "We selected Imagine Communications to enable us to build a more efficient workflow capable of handling the demands of modern-day sports production, from ingest through to playout and archive. Furthermore, as our parent company, Zee Entertainment, is also an Imagine Communications' playout solutions customer, we knew this solution was robust enough to meet our exacting requirements."
Ten's broadcast solution includes the Imagine D-Series automated content management and distribution system controlling Nexio playout servers running Nexio Motion and Insight software that create automated processes to move and manage media. Ten Sports executes ingest, asset management and playout on a Nexio Farad high-performance online storage network with intrinsic mirroring for content security.
"The Nexio IconMaster is a key component of the system and is exclusively used by our sports channels, streamlining the function of fade-in/out during live switching from one event to another — a feature that is extremely important in a sports production environment," added Bhargava.
Imagine Communications also provided the core infrastructure at Ten Sports, including a branding and master control switcher. Routing and multi-viewer capabilities provides signal routing, distribution and monitoring capabilities, enabling, said Imagine, clean and quiet switching for on-air applications in a small physical footprint.
