SNRT Morocco steps up to HD news production infrastructure with EVS

Moroccan broadcaster SNRT (Société Nationale de Radiodiffusion et de Télévision) has contracted EVS to deliver a new, centralised HD news production infrastructure. The country’s public broadcaster – which owns and operates ten television channels – will use the EVS technology as it transitions to HD.

With EVS’ XS3 live media servers at its core, the news production workflow will be shared by SNRT’s channels to produce current affairs and breaking news programmes. It will let the broadcaster streamline its overall operational costs and create easier shared access to recorded content between SNRT’s channels.

With multiple products integrated together into a single HD workflow at its headquarters in Rabat, the EVS news production infrastructure will enable efficient content ingest, creation, management, editing and playout for SNRT.

“Because we operate ten channels at once, having an intelligent centralized workflow that’s completely interoperable is very important,” said Faiçal Laraichi, CEO of SNRT. “When you’re producing multiple shows back to back like we do, we need technology that lets our production teams work as quickly and as efficiently as possible.”

For content ingest, the specially-designed news production solution features eight XS3 servers, which give SNRT up to 36 I/O channels in either HD or SD. These are used to ingest multiple feeds which are encoding natively in an XDCAM HD 50 codec as well as playout live broadcast feeds. Servers are linked together with XNet, EVS live media sharing network. This means any content recorded on SNRT’s servers is instantly available to any operators or editors and does so without interrupting media when ingest is in progress.

The rest of the news production solution is a modular workflow made up of multiple EVS technologies – IPDirector, XTAccess, XStore and the Xedio suite including its CleanEdit virtual editing software. The solution allows for simple control of the ingest of live feeds and the import of additional files from ENG operations. With the workflow, SNRT will be able to create to high-res and proxy files at the same time so content is available and accessible for production and editing teams.

Once ingested, content can be saved onto the facility’s online central storage and made available for easy media management like metadata attribution or content segregation. Throughout the workflow users can easily browse and preview content wherever it’s saved – whether this is on central storage or the infrastructure’s XS3 servers.