ASTRO Automation with Omnibus Systems

[A vendor update on OmniBus Systems.]

Southeast Asian regional broadcaster, Astro, is using OmniBus automation at its All Asia Broadcast Centre (AABC), just south of Kuala Lumpur, and at its Cyberjaya Broadcasting facility (CBC), located in the Malaysian Multimedia Super-Corridor, to enable high reliability and streamlined ingest, compliance editing, and playout operations in a completely tapeless environment.

The OmniBus Colossus playout automation system and G3 architecture also are being installed to support the broadcasting operation of PT Direct Vision, an Indonesian Direct-To-Home satellite television service offering Astro channels and services, at its broadcast centre in central Jakarta.

"OmniBus Systems proved to be the only automation vendor able to deliver a fully functional and unified network-based automation architecture that covered all of our needs, from production, ingest, and post-production to media management and playout," said Graham Stephens, Astro's Chief Technology Officer. "The system has allowed us to improve our workflow efficiency, and the linear scalability of the OmniBus Colossus automation system and the rich library of broadcast devices supported makes it easy and economical to add further services."

The Astro AABC provides uplink facilities for 54 Malaysian TV channels. An additional 48 channels, originated specifically for Indonesia, are uplinked from PT Direct Vision's new Jakarta broadcast center. The OmniBus network solution currently provides playout automation for a total of 36 channels for Malaysia and Indonesia combined, plus 6 third-party channels for which Astro provides playout under contract.

The Cyberjaya facility, located near the Putrajaya government administration center, boasts a playout capacity of an additional 33 channels from a redundant pair of video servers operating under Colossus control. The system, which was commissioned in December 2005, provided multichannel recording, editing, and playout functions for the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino and 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne. In June 2006 the system will be used to air eight interactive channels of live and time-shifted coverage of the World Cup in Germany. After the launch of its new satellite, Measat 3, later this year, Astro will bring all of its playout capacity on line, a total of 75 channels all driven from OmniBus Colossus across 3 separate broadcasting centers.

"We began work with Astro in 2003 with a pilot project involving four channels. Since then, the network has demonstrated a strong and continuing commitment to OmniBus solutions for automated multichannel playout," said OmniBus Systems Vice President of Sales Robert Stopford. "As Astro continues to grow its operations, the OmniBus Systems' G3 network architecture already in place will enable the rapid addition of new services and sites without interruption to existing on-air operations."

http://www.omnibus.tv.