Malaysia Digital Broadcaster, ASTRO installs Omneon Media Network server systems

March 21

Kuala Lumpur -- Digital Broadcaster, ASTRO ALL ASIA NETWORKS has recently installed 4 new Omneon Video Networks Spectrum media server systems to provide final playout-to-air at the company's All Asia Broadcast Centre (ABC), an all-digital, state-of-the-art broadcast complex at Technology Park Malaysia, Bukit Jalil, Kuala Lumpur, as well as at ASTRO's Cyberjaya Broadcast Centre, located about 40 kilometers south of Kuala Lumpur.

The 350,000-square-foot ABC facility is on a 29-acre site within the Malaysian Multimedia Super-Corridor (MSC).

Each of the facility's two playout servers provides 800 hours of 15- Mbps MPEG-2 storage and is configured with 36 playout ports, operating as main and backup, plus an additional 12 ports dedicated for ingest. The other two Spectrum server systems are configured with 350 hours of 30-Mbps MPEG-2 (I-Frame only) storage, and each has a further six outputs (main and backup) configured for MXF file transfers, as well as three ports dedicated to ingest. The four server systems are interconnected via a Fibre Channel link.

ASTRO drives its Omneon servers with OmniBus Systems Colossus automation, performing monitoring services with Miranda Technologies probes. The ABC transmission system supports 12 local playout services with ASTRO's Malaysian DTH bouquet, 10 into the company's Indonesian DTH bouquet, and eight regional services uplinked in C- band to service broadcasters in other territories.

The newly built Cyberjaya Broadcast Centre currently serves as a cold disaster-recovery and overflow facility, but it will perform 50 percent of the total broadcast duties for ASTRO Malaysia DTH operations later this year when the MEASAT-3 satellite has been launched.

The two servors at Cyberjaya operate at 30-Mbps MPEG-2 with a total of 490 hours of storage on the main server -- enough to keep all channels running live for 48 hours -- and another 327 hours -- enough to keep all channels live for 24 hours -- on the backup server. The Omneon servers are being integrated with a large media archive and asset management system provided by Front Porch Digital.

Graham Stephens, ASTRO's chief technology officer said that media should now be always available to every channel with the storage organized as RAID 3 in two dimensions, so no reloading of media is required in the rare event of component failure.