Australian SBS expands its agreement with Dalet

Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) deepens its partnership with Dalet to expand content orchestration and collaboration across all radio, television and digital platforms.

Australian broadcaster Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) has extended its agreement with Dalet to expand the Dalet Galaxy Media Asset Management (MAM) platform as well as its orchestration offering. The new implementation will facilitate the production and distribution of news, sports, radio programs in multiple languages ​​and musical content across the station's television, radio and digital platforms. The new deployment will bolster SBS' production capacity ahead of the 2018 FIFA World Cup.

Building on the successful integration of dozens of systems and the automation of multiple program management workflows into a unified Dalet Galaxy environment, the expansion of the facility will now encompass news and sports production as well as full radio automation for SBS music channels. This will provide production content to three television channels, eight radio channels (music and talk show), the SBS website and online applications. SBS radio programming is produced in more than 70 languages, making it the most diverse broadcaster globally from a linguistic point of view. In addition to the 2018 FIFA World Cup, the production of other sporting events that will be facilitated by the new integration include world-class events such as the Tour de France or the English Premier League.

Noel Leslie, Chief Technology Officer at SBS, said: "Following the first phase of our strategic move to optimize our programming content under the management of a single MAM platform, we embark on phase two with full confidence in our partnership with Dalet. The SBS and Dalet teams have collaborated on the software rollout and system integration for this project. Change management is also extremely important to us at SBS, and we have made it central to our strategy of engaging key stakeholders throughout the project. throughout the chain and through our geographically extended operation from the beginning of the process.”

The system will be deployed at four sites, including the SBS headquarters in Sydney, the Melbourne production centre, a third system in Canberra and the disaster recovery headquarters located in Sydney.

Specifically, Dalet will unify content preparation, production and ingest across two television studios and eight radio studios in Sydney and another eight radio studios in Melbourne, bringing together up to 300 simultaneous users working with the system. Video ingest for 50 channels spread across the country, along with multiple audio ingest channels, will be managed centrally under the control of Dalet. The Dalet AmberFin media processing platform will assist with transcoding as needed.

Dalet On-the-Go will also be available to connect journalists in the field directly to the central Dalet Galaxy platform. Dalet OneCut provides desktop editing and remote editing in Canberra studios. The BPMN 2.0 standard-compliant Dalet workflow engine automates publishing to multiple platforms, including social media workflows as well as archiving operations.

Raoul Cospen, Product Manager at Dalet, highlights that "there are many tangible benefits that SBS will receive by further standardizing production in a single unified environment: lower total cost of ownership, optimized support and training costs, fewer integration systems... and all thanks to the powerful agility and extensibility of the Dalet Galaxy platform. Using the full scope of the Dalet platform, SBS is able to unite and streamline its content collaboration across SBS's different departments geographically and orchestrate program acquisition, preparation and distribution workflows.

Dalet Galaxy's open APIs are used for a variety of interfaces with third parties, including the Power Gold music programming system and Adobe Premiere Pro CC for editing across Opta Sports' three production centers and data channels. Integrations with Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) provide SBS teams with a single user interface to easily access and manage content. Other integrations facilitated by Dalet include Ross Overdrive in the SBS automated production studio, Ross Expression for graphics and the Drupal content management system. Lastly, integrations with social media networks Facebook, Twitter and YouTube make this facility a complete end-to-end solution for SBS to effectively target its audiences across all available platforms.