BLOOMBERGQUINT : AV-OTT Streamcast Digital Platform Case Study

PCR at BloombergQuint Mumbai office

The joint venture between Bloomberg News and Quintillion Media has become the pioneer in the Indian broadcast industry as it adopted alterations propelled by the changing broadcast scenario, thus becoming the first business news channel to directly go on digital or OTT platform rather than broadcast.

While starting this channel, the main idea was to have a blend of workflow between the digital and broadcast, which is not seen in the Indian broadcast setups easily. The industry treats the two processes separately and runs them in parallel  by pushing, transcoding & formating. The aim was not only to establish themselves on digital platform like any other mainstream media but also to go on social media platform. Though a lot of production process remained the same, the change in the distribution pattern did demand the technical update and new equipment that would facilitate the smooth functioning of the process and provide more flexibility to capture maximum OTT platforms.

Mohit Sardana – CTO says, “We carefully handpicked an efficient partner as our System Integrator and thus entrusted this herculean responsibility on the able shoulders of Cineom Broadcast. Cineom is empowered by a proficient team and seasoned experience to achieve complex goals under stringent time line.”

Television is changing in ways that make it increasingly difficult to consider linear broadcasting in isolation from other modes of distribution to audiences, such as the Internet, Mobile & OTT, to deal with it have designed workflow in such a way that we are Live on OTT & Social Media i.e. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube at the same time from Single Platform.

The technical head of the channel was very keen to have state-of-the art workflow which will have an unique blend of Baseband and IT. He was keen to have workflow capabilities seamlessly integrated together to give news teams the collaborative workflow, efficiency and speed required to break news, across every platform, on multiple devices. He was supported by very knowledgeable and hardworking team of engineers, who are integral part of success.

Saving time and effort is valuable to any newsroom and we were enabled to justify the same through full integration with NRCS, graphics, playout and above all AVID embracing with its futuristic broadcast abilities.

This integrated new workflow enables you to create and deliver multiple angles of a story to larger and wider audiences across TV, websites, mobile apps, and social media channels. It will save newsroom time and operating cost while deploying iNEWS in a hybrid cloud environment.

PCR at BloombergQuint Mumbai office

At Quint, “We decided to have an open studio without walls or glasses, going in accordance with the Bloomberg Studio style worldwide as contrary to the conventional news studio look.” Mohit Says . The facility features four studios at present of which three are open and 4th is a virtual studio. Equipped with Four operational studios and Two PCRs, BloombergQuint is the first English business news channel in India to use AR and VR technology.

The studio 2 is smaller in size compared to the main studio. It features multi camera set-up with moving video walls. It has the capacity to occupy two to three cameras. There are five such video walls each of which features four 46 inch display screen that are used in the back drop of this studio along with fixed LED screens of the same size.

Lastly, the virtual studio, which is the virtual studio, features all Vizart equipment and the Shotoku camera support system.

For the archival, it is done via DIVA. DIVA is one of the leading systems in the world and goes well with AVID.

Oracle DIVAdirector is a digital asset management system that gives you full control of the assets housed in Oracle DIVArchive via a familiar interface, so you can quickly locate, access, and manage media.

Mr. Narender Khokhar, Sr. Broadcast Manager was very careful choosing baseband setup. “All these studios are using Sony cameras which is the best picks from the new age camera system. The Facility is equipped with State-of-the art PCR with entirely SNMP base studio and PCR gears which can monitor remotely to find out issues instantly  and remain operational without any interruption,” says Narender.

Sanket Patkar, IT Infra head Said “Technological change is a constant feature in media industries & is moving rapidly towards the hand shaking of Digital and Broadcast and access to broadcast infrastructure is vital for Media Services, to meet these requirements have designed our network facility 1:1 without compromising anything using complete Backbone on 10G, Best Network Equipment i.e. Switches, Firewall, Wifi Controllers, APs etc. & Multiple ISP, considering to deal with future expansion & upgrade challenges.”

Differences the channel had to incorporate owing to difference in the delivery platform:

Being the first of its kind channel to adopt a different delivery platform BloombergQuint had to face several challenges. The change in the platform demanded changing insertion of the latest technology in the workflow. 

At present, BloombergQuint is delivering the content to OTT platforms (Live & VOD). Sardana said, “We are using almost same equipment for digital as well as for the broadcast except a few, like Elemental which is vital in feed distribution which gives me flexibility in distribution as every OTT platform has different set of specifications and different ART rates. For instance some have a HLS M3U8 and others might have RTMP or completely different feed requirement. So it is a major advantage.”

Conclusion:

BloombergQuint had started the digital platform in 2016 and the award winning platform was live from September 2017. The current facility in Mumbai was commenced on 28th April 2017 and the first dry run was hit on 16th July 2017. The company started with the live digital streaming on 21st September 2017.