MUMBAI: Computing and creative technologies aid workflow, storage and infrastructure solutions for all aspects of the media and content creation industry. IT solutions providers help with latest computing, networking, media hardware and software to provide the best output. 

Specialised companies bring extensive product knowledge and world-class engineering to industry. Installation of video servers enables content producers and journalists to upload content from the field directly to the broadcaster’s customised Content Management System (CMS), an action that automatically creates planning events.

Dalet Digital Media System recently announced that the youngest venture of Zee Media Corporation World Is One News (WION) has utilised Dalet Unified News Operations. Dalet solution is powering and supporting the international news channel with comprehensive media logistics, newsroom computer system and news production workflow facilitated by the Dalet Galaxy Media Asset Management (MAM) and orchestration platform, with full ingest and playout operations relying on Dalet Brio video servers.

WION delivers news coverage from across the globe with a South Asian perspective to the international audience across the web, mobile devices and TV. Operated by Zee with headquarters in India and bureaux in 37 global locations, WION is the first India-based network to have a presence in the U.K., U.S., China, Russia and Africa, making it south Asia’s first truly convergent, multi-media English news network.

A critical aspect of the installation for WION was to enable journalists and producers to upload content from the field directly to the broadcaster’s customized Content Management System (CMS), an action that automatically creates planning events thanks to the Dalet Unified News Operations collaborative workflow.

“Our philosophy of ‘being one with the world’ holds that news is the common thread that binds us all together and makes critical the ability to deliver news in the moment, from anywhere to any channel,” says WION editor-in-chief Rohit Gandhi. “We sought and found a partner in Dalet to provide the backbone to our network-wide news infrastructure. The solution not only accelerates time to air but enables better collaboration with a highly efficient and agile set of tools, from remote content creation to centralized content curation and onwards to publication on the digital and TV platforms our audiences are choosing.”

WION is the first broadcaster in India to deploy the Dalet Galaxy-based Unified News Operations workflow.

Easy-to-use production tools via web-based Dalet WebSpace and relevant story content are readily available to every user in the newsroom and in the field. When WION journalists receive a notification about an assignment, they can search, browse and access every asset in the Dalet platform from their desktop, laptop or mobile device, whether it is news wires and footage that just came in, or existing stories and video packages. Beyond the walls of the newsroom, WION journalists use the Dalet On-the-Go mobile app to check assignments and create packages, exporting content to the CMS, as well as to YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Video and scripts can be logged and edited within Dalet OneCut, or sent to Adobe Premiere via Dalet Xtend for craft editing. Media and associated metadata are tracked and managed by Dalet Galaxy every step of the way, including playlist export and import to and from the CMS. Once approved by a producer, final content is readily available for use in the built-in production control room automation and exported to the CMS as a multimedia story object.

Beyond the comprehensive set of tools and services natively built into Dalet Galaxy, the advanced web-services API integrates and unifies the full ecosystem of technologies and in-house tools used at Zee WION, including the custom CMS based on Kentico that drives workflows within the Dalet solution. Other integrations include WINBDL teleprompter, WASP graphics system and Quantum SNFS with NetApp E series storage.

“This installation is a perfect example of the Dalet Unified News Operations solution. Having the NRCS, the production tools and the archives fully integrated, along with a flexible workflow engine and web-services API, enables WION to truly implement a ‘digital first’ approach to deliver the right content, on the right device, to the right audience, ahead of the competition,” says Dalet Asia Pacific general manager Raoul Cospen. “Deployed in record time, the end-to-end workflow was on air within a few short weeks of signing the contract for Dalet Unified News Operations.”

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