As the first regional and national 24-hour news and current affairs platform (TV, web, mob) in the Balkans, serving over 20 million people, the TV news network N1 Dnevnik is continually upgrading its facilities and on-air look to attract viewers. With production centers in Belgrade, Sarajevo and Zagreb N1 Dnevnik is a CNN exclusive news channel affiliate, so image quality and reliability are key to its success.

N1 is owned by Adria Media (a member of the United Group of companies) and operates the region’s largest cable TV provider with over 1.5 million viewers. The channel has chosen an integrated solution from Orad Hi-Tec Systems that includes video servers for playout, news graphics, and media asset management (MAM). All of the equipment and systems are now operating out of the company’s main studio in Belgrade and their studios in Zagreb and Sarajevo.

The complete production and signal distribution system solution helps N1 deliver information accurately and in a timely fashion, thanks to a professional team of journalists and editors, as well as leveraging advanced broadcast digital technology. This includes the new equipment from Orad, which is designed to handle the entire workflow, from ingest to playout, for both videos and graphics. It offers a fast turnaround digital workflow that Rusmir Nefic, Director of program and production of N1, said enhances production value and speeds up time to air. In addition to relying on Orad’s server and graphic suite, the staff can integrate third-party technology as required, closely tied and controlled by Orad’s MAM solution.

“We are very pleased with our decision to use Orad’s broadcast solution,” Nefic said. “Not only does it provide the reliability, state of the art technologies, and forward-looking approach we need, but Orad’s professional services team helped us integrate other technologies to Orad’s platforms, providing us with an efficient and comprehensive workflow.”

Orad Hi-Tec Systems develops and markets real-time 3D broadcast graphic, video server, and media asset management solutions for a variety of applications; including news, channel branding, sports production and enhancement, elections and special events, virtual studios, and virtual advertisement.

Launched in October 2014, N1 employs over 200 professional broadcast and web journalists producing news, informative, sports, entertaining and educational content. The channel is distributed through pay-TV platforms across Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia.  In related news: XenData storage was chosen by the N1 channel to manage a Sony Optical Disc Archive library. The optical disc archive consists of a Sony PetaSite library (model ODS-L30M) plus an expansion module, which currently provides a 136TB capacity that can be scaled to more than 800TB. [The Sony cartridges provide an extremely stable recording medium with a 50-year archive lifetime.] The archive library is managed by a XenData SX-520 Series archive server, which presents the entire contents of the library as one large file system. This means that the archive interface looks like a giant disc-based system with a standard file-folder structure. Files are written to and restored from the archive by an IBIS iFind media asset management system that interfaces with the XenData archive server.