Al Jazeera, FIFA cup, sports
Dubai-based systems integrator Qvest Media, who had installed a new tapeless ingest, editing and playout solution for Al Jazeera Sports in Doha, Qatar last year and expanded its playout channels from ten to 16, recently expanded the facility’s infrastructure even further to accommodate the broadcaster’s FIFA World Cup requirements. Qvest Media integrated three additional World Cup channels and three backup channels into the existing broadcasting environment. To implement this, Qvest Media planned and integrated an Avid iNews editing system and equipped the postproduction of the TV channel with a total of 20 workstations, which included Avid iNews Instinct, five Assist Workstations and 12 Avid MediaComposer and NewsCutter systems. Furthermore, 18 AirSpeed platforms for ingest and studio applications as well as redundant capture managers and com-mand servers were integrated for the playout. The ISIS system, which had been planned and supplied by Qvest Media, has been extended by 32 TB and features now a storage capacity of more than 2.400 hours. To guarantee the backup of data in the broadcast centre of Al Jazeera Sports, Qvest Media furthermore installed a multiple redundant Cisco Coreswitch, which forms the backbone in the IT network, as well as five Cisco Floorswitches, each connected using two redundant 10 Gb fibres. As Al Jazeera announced the switch to 16:9 on the occasion of the FIFA World Cup, four additional Qvest Media service technicians were on site to supervise the production and broadcasting during the world championships.
