Croatia's HRT Expands Broadcast Workflow On NETIA's Radio-Assist Software Suite

Thu, 6th, Dec 2007

NETIA's Radio-Assist suite of digital audio software products is being used by public radio broadcaster Croatian Radiotelevision (Hrvatska Radiotelevizija, or HRT) to streamline acquisition, editing, scheduling, broadcasting, and archiving within a highly efficient workflow.

Today HRT works with more than 100 production workstations in approximately 20 different departments at its main facility in Zagreb, Croatia. Radio-Assist is also installed at HRT regional sites across the country in cities such as Zadar, Split, and Dubrovnik.

"Among the main reasons we chose to work with the NETIA solution is that it gives our staff the ability to record, edit, or prepare playlists from within a single application," said Marko Malnar, head of HRT's technical department. "Radio-Assist gives our journalists direct control over their work. Rather than negotiate with a technician to try to achieve the right result, our reporters, editors, and producers now use NETIA software to record and edit material. With this capacity has come greater creativity in how our staff members approach the creation of their shows, and we have seen the positive results of this change in our on-air broadcasts."

HRT first installed NETIA systems in 1998, beginning with the deployment of a NETIA automation system consisting of two production workstations and four on-air workstations. In subsequent years, the broadcaster adopted additional NETIA systems and connected each regional site with the Zagreb facility using dedicated 2-Mbps, 10-Mbps, and 34-Mbps links to enable fast and automated content exchange.

Content for HRT production is acquired both manually and automatically from several different feeds. During the editing process, Sequoia multitrack recording and editing software is interfaced with Radio-Assist to enable music production and mastering. In playout, the Radio-Assist scheduling module supports scheduling of the full daily playlist for eight different HRT studios. NETIA's AirDDO Live-Assist mode facilitates playout during the day and a fully automatic mode takes over playout during nighttime hours. The On-Air workstation is set up in a master/slave configuration to prevent any crash on the main workstation from interrupting the on-air broadcast.

Radio-Assist is being paired with a NOA Audio Systems workstation to enable digitizing and ingest of HRT content for archiving within an EMC2 storage system. When fully integrated with the NOA Audio Systems database, Radio-Assist will manage delivery of media to different areas of the facility workflow in the correct format: high-resolution for archiving, middle-resolution for the production domain, and low-resolution for browsing the media library. This phase of HRT's expansion is scheduled to be finalized in Summer 2008, at which point NETIA's media management and Autofill solutions will manage the traffic among these domains and enable further automation of channel playout. With certification and support from NETIA, technicians at HRT are prepared to run diagnostics and maintain the system as necessary.

Hrvatska radiotelevizija (HRT) is the Croatian public broadcasting company, which was launched as the private station Zagreb Radiostation in 1926. Since then the company has been nationalized, representing the first public broadcasting facility in Southeastern Europe, and has grown to include several radio and television stations. HRT comprises three organizational units: Croatian Radio (Hrvatski radio - HR), Croatian Television (Hrvatska televizija - HRT), and Music Production (Glazbena proizvodnja)

Source: http://www.broadcastbuyer.tv/publish/New_Contracts_24/Croatia_s_HRT_Expands_Broadcast_Workflow_On_NETIA_s_Radio-Assist_Software_Suite_14205.shtml

Weblinks:   http://www.netia.com/   http://www.hrt.hr/

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