Unwinding with Al Sumaria

Al Sumaria, an Iraqi variety entertainment channel, backed by Lebanese investors, may have several stories to tell its viewers every day. But there's one that it hasn't told anyone - its own story of how it shifted to a new production and playout facility in Lebanon in just one afternoon.

The first Iraqi channel to be launched after the fall of Saddam Hussein, Al Sumaria wanted to build its headquarters in Lebanon, far from the war and destruction in Baghdad. What it didn't bargain for was a similar situation in Lebanon in the summer of 2006.

The channel, which already had a production facility and over 300 staff in Iraq, began its Beirut operations in 2004 from a temporary facility while a state-of-the-art production, and newsroom and playout facility was being designed in a new location in Lebanon. The US $3 million project was awarded to Lebanese systems integrator, Broadcast & Communication Systems (BCS), and the final phase of the project was scheduled for completion in 2006.

However, in July 2006, when the war between Lebanon and Israel began, Al Sumaria found itself stuck in a war zone. One day, it was decided that the channel would move its 200 odd staff and equipment immediately to the new premises. What should have been a four-month shift, therefore, happened one afternoon, and Al Sumaria moved to a brand new facility in the summer of 2006.

"We initially built the newsroom system at the ART facility," says Joseph Hallage, sales & marketing manager of BCS. "At that time, the rest of the equipment was being flown in. We were supposed to start shifting slowly and part by part a couple of months from then. But with the war, we found ourselves in a situation where we had to move everything to the new facility or suffer damage. And then, they had to be back on air within 48 hours. This was a major challenge. What should have been a three-month move got done in 48 hours. It was a huge challenge during such difficult times but then, a war can make you do things you cannot bring yourself to do under normal circumstances," he adds.

The quick move, however, hasn't stopped Al Sumaria from being one of the top facilities in the Middle East today. The TV station boasts a digital newsroom - the first of its kind in the Middle East. It has put in place a tapeless integrated newsroom that the BBC World Service has now adopted for its new Arabic TV channel. Al Sumaria combines standard IT infrastructure (servers, storage, workstations) with proprietary broadcast equipment (Omneon server, Autoscript teleprompter). In doing this, it has invested in a cost efficient and easy-to-maintain system that most broadcasters today are still striving to put in place in the near future. Al Sumaria's newsroom application uses a Dalet newsroom system along with an Omneon server and Net Apps storage. Its automation system includes a playout system that runs on Harris automation along with a Seachange server.

Although the new servers are competitive products, Jad Faddoul, deputy IT manager of Al Sumaria says, the channel chose Omneon with Dalet and Seachange with Harris because it felt those systems worked best in combination with each other. "Dalet and Omneon work well and Harris and Seachange are great together," he explains.

Al Sumaria uses a DaletPlus News Suite, which provides it with a single platform that acts as newsroom computer system, a news production system as well as an automation and archiving platform. The journalists at Al Sumaria use DaletPlus News Suite workstations to browse video feeds from News agencies straight from their desktops. Agency feeds are captured by DaletPlus Ingest for firewire loop recorders which run on standard IT servers. These, in turn, are connected to professional FireWire bridges to continuously record incoming feeds in a buffer. Crash and scheduled recordings extract the video from these buffers to store the recorded material onto a central production storage, which in this case, is a NetApp network attached storage system). Journalists then make shot selections on the fly using Dalet MediaLogger and share these with editors that put together simple packages using Dalet MediaCutter.

At the TV station, packages are finalised by editors who use Adobe Premiere Pro workstations and then save the final package back to the networked production storage. All media is stored centrally in native DV 25 and accessed across a Gigabit Ethernet network. In addition to production and play-out, DaletPlus News Suite is used by journalists and producers to browse incoming wire feeds, write scripts and build rundowns. Field reporters remotely contribute to the newsroom using their web-browser. Finalised stories that are scheduled for broadcast are then automatically migrated by DaletPlus News Suite from the production storage to the Omneon Spectrum Media server. Play-out and show-time tracking is ensured in the gallery using DaletPlus News Suite workstations that drive the teleprompter and the Omneon server.

"One reason why this newsroom is unique is because the DaletPlus News Suite system used at Al Sumaria greatly simplifies the complexity of the newsroom environment," explains Nicolas Hans, director of marketing, Dalet. "At Al Sumaria, the newsroom workflow is 99% file-based. Video signals come in and video play-out is the final result. Once video is ingest, IP packets replace video streams. Logging, editing, transfers and all other operations are done on files. Not only does this allow for faster than real-time operations which facilitates breaking news coverage, it also means that there is less video cabling, less video specific infrastructure. This gives way to significant cost-savings in terms of deployment. At Al Sumaria, the Ethernet computer network is the backbone for production - not the SDI routing," he adds.

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