The new production system uses IBM Aspera Orchestrator to manage video and audio for more than 35 Mediacorp brands, including seven television and 11 radio stations as well as OTT distribution systems. Mediacorp previously used different systems for handling video from more than 20 different internal and external vendor systems.

Orchestrator now provides a common solution for Mediacorp to collect, manage and distribute video across all systems, including on-premises systems and public clouds. It helps manage more than 200 workflows and automatically handles parts of the process, such as encoding video for different formats, to help reduce manual tasks and speed time to market.

“The scale of the technical facilities that have been implemented is beyond anything we’ve done before,” said Norraine Yusof, SVP of Campus Technology Development at Mediacorp. "The technology we’ve installed for the newsroom, from ingest to playout – and the support and training we receive from EVS – was key to ensure our workflow for our journalists and technicians.

The EVS technical infrastructure at the campus includes technology for ingest, management, editing and output of content. There are six XS production servers ingesting content which are managed by several IPDirector live production asset management systems while ten Ingest Funnel applications allow for ENG crews to ingest additional content from camera cards.

The core of the infrastructure relies on 42 XTAccess transcoding and transfer engines and eight additional servers supporting the IPDirector and Xedio applications across the network. At the heart of the system is EVS’ XStore SAN storage – a 492TB system which has the capacity to store 12,000 hours of high-resolution or 20,000 hours of low-resolution content.

The solution deployed for the newsroom incorporates 280 Xedio Cutter applications which give users the ability to create a story framework for editors to pick up and edit using the IPLink for Adobe plugins which facilitates easy access to content within the network. Journalists can also edit content themselves using one of the 170 workstations installed in the newsroom with EVS’ Xedio CleanEdit.

Once content is completed, another five XS servers take care of the playout of the programmes from the news production control room. All of the workflow’s 12 XS servers – whether for ingest or playout – are interconnected with a high-bandwidth media sharing network using two XHub3 systems from EVS.

“Mediacorp didn’t want an infrastructure of disparate elements. The EVS-centric workflow that’s been delivered is a complete production chain – from start to finish,” said Olivier Heurteaux, SVP APAC at EVS. “By planning and rolling out a workflow in this way, the company’s production crews, journalists and editors have an easy to operate production workflow that outputs the highest-quality content possible.