This was the goal of India's Public Service Broadcaster, Doordarshan, when it upgraded its production operations with the installation of a Pebble Beach Systems Marina automation system for its flagship 24-hour news channel, DD News.

With over 100 million viewers across the country, DD News is India’s main terrestrial/satellite news channel. The channel produces over 17 hours of live transmission and 30 news bulletins in Hindi, English, Urdu and Sanskrit. Additionally, DD’s regional news units produce four daily regional shows, and the channel broadcasts daily sports bulletins, a business show, current affairs programs and several special shows on health, youth issues, arts and culture, and international events.

The Marina system features a MOS interface and offers emergency ingest capability from a live feed. Supplied as a fully redundant system with automatic changeover, it is being installed to replace an ageing playout automation system that is no longer supported.

Samir Isbaih, Pebble’s Regional Manager for the Middle East and South Asia, said that they are enabling our customers to put in place a painless, phased transition strategy that allows them to import legacy databases into Marina to ease the migration.

Marina is unique in its ability to evolve any playout infrastructure from legacy device control to incorporate new and evolving technologies, with minimum disruption to processes and staff. With Marina, not only is all metadata crucial to the description and playback of assets transferred, but an active database bridge is also created between the legacy system and the new one to keep them in sync and enable them to run in parallel.