First pan-African news channel on air with Stingray

Africa 24, the first pan-African news channel, has installed the Pebble Beach Stingray channel in a box solution at its Paris transmission centre. Africa 24 is a 24-7 network aiming to provide editorially independent, balanced and realistic coverage of the African continent.

As the most watched French-language African channel, it broadcasts to a core audience of viewers from Sub-Saharan Africa, and is also available via satellite to subscribers in the Middle East, North Africa and beyond. The network was launched in 2009 and expansion plans include offering further language variants including English, Arabic, Spanish and Portuguese.

Africa 24’s single channel fully redundant Stingray system was supplied by Pebble Beach Systems’ partner in France, Soft4TV, and installed in May, with operator training completed early in June. It integrates into the broadcaster’s existing technical infrastructure, offering automatic media movement from the current media SAN.

Stingray leverages automation and integrated channel technology to deliver a full HD ingest and playout channel-in-a-box solution for systems of up to six channels. In addition to hosting clip-based channels, it is designed to handle complex reactive channels featuring live content, late-breaking changes and dynamic schedules.

Thanks to its client-server architecture, multiple channels can be controlled from a single operator position, and user privileges and access to specific functionality can be set on a per channel basis.

Stingray’s native 2D Flash graphics playout capability is deployed to deliver graphics which are dynamically updated when breaking stories arrive, and its audio and DVE functionality are used to generate transitions between news segments.