MBC completes migration of playout to Marina

Free-to-air network MBC Group has completed the process of migrating the playout of all its 23 channels to Pebble Beach Systems’ flagship Marina automation solution. BroadcastPro ME has previously made reference to this installation.

MBC initially deployed a Pebble Beach Systems Neptune playout automation solution several years ago. The phased migration across to Marina automation was completed late in 2017.

Nick Barratt, Senior Manager – Broadcast at MBC Group expanded on the rationale for migrating to Marina, which presents the operator with a single unified operator interface, regardless of the underlying technology being controlled.

“Unifying under the common user experience of an open system, with an extensive and evolving library of API integrations, allows us to take advantage of the technology changes currently happening in the broadcast world, regardless of manufacturer. We aim to make it totally immaterial to the operator not only what systems underpin the channel they are working on, but also if those systems are physical, virtual or even their location.”

Bassam Faour, Broadcast Manager at MBC Group, added: “A key deciding factor in our decision to upgrade with Marina was Pebble’s track record of supporting an open approach to systems and suppliers”.

MBC and Pebble worked closely together throughout the process, starting with a six-week parallel run before the first two channels, the Al Arabiya and Al Hadath news channels, were transferred to Marina control.

“This healthy parallel run period highlighted any issues and resulted in a complete non-event during switch-over,” confirmed Barratt.

Emad Dabbah, Senior Manager – Transmission & Digital Archive at MBC Group added: “As we embarked on the migration, we worked closely with Pebble to fine-tune the system’s performance for the fast-paced news environment.”

Pebble’s Regional Manager for the Middle East and South Asia, Samir Isbaih added: “In this region, where Neptune is the dominant automation solution, we pride ourselves in offering a flexible but intelligent migration strategy to Marina which causes little or no disruption to the end user’s operations. Users who upgrade to Marina from Neptune benefit from a number of unique advantages. Firstly, their existing Neptune database is fully migrated onto the new platform with no information lost and, as at MBC, both systems can run in parallel so that migration can be done gradually to suit the end user’s timescale. Furthermore, Neptune playlists can be natively opened in Marina, and both Neptune and Marina can talk to the same Archive and NLS in Parallel. Crucially, operators can carry on working as usual with minimal if any training.”