India’s Times Group Builds End-to-End Tapeless Workflow

Times Group of India is using the Omneon, Inc.‘s media storage and processing platform as the basis of a multimillion-dollar renovation and expansion of its Mumbai facility.

This state-of-the-art facility supports the post-production and broadcast of the popular 24-hour glamour and lifestyle channel, ZoOm, and playout of the leading 24-hour English news channel, Times Now and its sister channel, ET Now.

ZoOm was the first TV post company and entertainment channel in India to adopt the Omneon MediaGrid active storage system for high-performance central storage and Omneon Spectrum media servers for reliable ingest and playout of SD channels. The flexible and highly scalable Omneon platform optimizes the company’s entire broadcast chain from acquisition through editing, post-production, and playout.

"In the Omneon MediaGrid and Spectrum systems, we have acquired technology that has been proven in many deployments worldwide, as well as dedicated support from an experienced team," said Gaurav Sahni, technical head of ZoOm Entertainment Network Ltd. "In particular, the Omneon MediaGrid system’s capacity to provide simultaneous, shared, edit-in-place access to our Final Cut Pro workstations – with no need for copying or transferring files – simplifies our workflow for greater enterprise-wide efficiency and, ultimately, more cost-effective operation."

Within the new file-based workflow, one Spectrum system ingests DV25 content from a variety of sources and transfers it to the Omneon MediaGrid system, which features an advanced grid-based architecture that maximizes capacity, scales bandwidth, and enables processing functions, such as transcoding, to be performed on clips residing in storage.

"The Spectrum system simplifies our operation considerably by enabling us to schedule and perform simultaneous ingest and playout and by affording real-time control of our complex broadcast workflow," said Rajat Nigam, Times Global Broadcasting director of operations.

"ZoOm also is taking advantage of the Omneon ProBrowse application, which allows staff to create and view low-resolution proxy versions of full-resolution material contained within an Omneon storage system," said Amit Sen, general manager, Operations and Technology, at ZoOm.

"Times Group has built a new broadcast infrastructure with the flexibility and capacity necessary to take premium programming to air quickly and with confidence," said Geoff Stedman, Omneon senior vice president of marketing and business development. "The integrated solution offered by Omneon supports improved efficiencies across the broadcast workflow and provides smooth, smart operation that meets the broadcaster’s current financial and commercial needs while accommodating the demands of future growth."

The Omneon MediaGrid and Spectrum systems were installed at Times Group with the assistance of Megahertz Broadcast Systems Ltd. and local partner Shaf Broadcast Pvt. Ltd.