MUMBAI: News broadcaster NDTV has extended its quality control, delivery and branding capabilities with digital broadcast solutions from Harris Broadcast Communications — including the Harris Selenio media convergence platform for its master control environment.
NDTV chose Selenio, which combines traditional baseband video and audio processing, compression and IP networking to concentrate its standards conversion, transcoding and trans-wrapping for streaming in one simple 3RU frame.
NDTV will initially use Selenio for master control tasks including loudness control, colour correction, video clipping, Dolby audio processing, up/down/cross conversion and back up logo generation.
NDTV CTO Dinesh Singh said, “Convergence is vitally important to us, because our audiences demand our content on the device that is most convenient to them at the time. The logical progression from that is to move all of our production and delivery capabilities toward a tapeless, file-based environment. Selenio is a remarkable device that bridges the baseband and file worlds like no other."
NDTV has also committed itself to meeting the newly defined international standards on loudness, ensuring consistency of perceived volume across the whole of a channel’s output. The Harris solution is unique in that within its modular infrastructure format, it can check for loudness errors, correct them without damaging the aesthetic qualities of the sound balance, and provide a confirmed, final quality check to demonstrate compliance.
Harris Broadcast Communications regional head South Asia Somu Patil said, “Loudness control is not mandatory yet in India, but customers like NDTV are looking to adopt some kind of audio management control as their channels are transmitted across Europe and the USA, which mandate them to manage their audio output”.
NDTV has also recently installed a number of Harris IconMaster modular control and branding solutions to enhance the on-air look across all its channels and outputs.
In the rapidly expanding Indian broadcast market, it is vital for channels to have a distinguishable brand as a means of attracting and retaining viewers. As the channels are also available to the Indian community living overseas, readily identifiable branding helps viewers find the content they seek.
IconMaster provides a simplified workflow for automated channel branding and squeezing graphics over commercial breaks, the company said.
