Asharq News provides the Arabic-speaking population worldwide with live news focused on economy and finance on online, social media, TV and radio channels. The all-IP architecture of virtualized on-premises systems and cloud applications for content aggregation, production and distribution is apparently unrivalled.

"With Asharq News, we have launched one of the world's most advanced live news platforms together with Qvest Media as our master systems integrator,” says Omran Abdallah, CTO of Asharq News. “The wide range in collaboration and news research allows us to report live and on the pulse of the action quickly, which is crucial to our success. We are very pleased about the outstanding and positive international response that we have received since our launch on November 11, 2020.”

Journalists from Asharq News can collaborate remotely thanks to the news workflow across the studios in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Cairo and Riyadh. The 100 GBit/s-capable infrastructure supports the SMPTE ST 2110, NMOS IS-04 and IS-05 standards and offers sufficient bandwidth for an UHD/4K upgrade of the production infrastructure in the future. The audio-over-IP implementation supports IEEE, IETF, and AES67. Since the network consists of customary IT components, it forms the basis for both the redundant broadcast network design and the seamlessly integrated corporate IT network.

For the design and the construction of the media infrastructure, Qvest Media coordinated more than 25 manufacturers as part of its vendor management to form a seamless live news workflow. A central component to accelerate this news workflow is the multicloud management platform qibb. As a cloud application management layer, qibb is used to orchestrate and monitor the cloud applications relevant for news production: the newsroom system Avid iNEWS, the production platform Avid MediaCentral Cloud UX, the social media aggregation and research of x.news and Burli NewsHub, as well as the social media publishing from Wildmoka. This allows incoming news feeds to be curated and routed to the responsible journalists easily and the smart networking of best-of-breed components creates a unique and revolutionary live news workflow.

"Asharq News incorporates our many years of experience in the future technologies of All-IP, cloud management and smart news production," says Philipp Glänzel, GM and CTO of Qvest Media Dubai. "We are happy about our substantial contribution to the technical capabilities and advanced infrastructure for an enhanced distribution of the latest news across the Arab-speaking world.”

Asharq News also features video walls and floor displays with a total area of more than 300 square meters. The LED walls can be divided into several segments and have a movable, motorized ceiling suspension that allows them to be moved silently in on-air mode. In addition to the design and installation of these systems, Qvest also integrated the necessary technology for the visualization of graphic and video material, which is used for the interactive display of program accompanying content on the LED walls.