Masstech Wins Contract With Consortium for Educational Communication In India

The Consortium for Educational Communication (CEC) in India has awarded Masstech Group Inc. a contract to automate ingest for digital preservation, LTO archiving, media asset management (MAM) and broadcast playout of four channels to widen the reach of their educational programmes.

The CEC in New Delhi is a government body that creates and distributes educational content for broadcast on its 24 hour Higher Education Channel known as Vyas. Set up by University Grants Commission (UGC), the consortium uses electronic media for development of higher education in the country by producing recorded educational seminars or ‘live’ content.

Brad Redwood, Vice President of International and Marketing at Masstech Group said: "Our latest contract win with CEC is a significant event – making this one of our largest projects in India – this is a reinforcement of our commitment to the Indian market. CEC has chosen to partner with Masstech, acknowledging our value as the affordable MAM solution that provides true end-to-end file based workflow."

The – broadcast solution integrates Masstech’s TOPAZ v7.5.1 for streamlined media asset management (MAM), companion products XT-Ingest, XT-Edit, SAPPHIRE v2.0 for SD/HD playout and automation using Masstech’s own PUB-2000 decoder boards, integrated Pulsar MXL (File based QC), IBM Nearline Cache and a Spectra T120 LTO-5 library. TOPAZ is integrated with the SAPPHIRE playout servers for automatic playlist control of CEC’s programming. The built-in TOPAZ hierarchical storage management (HSM) will connect to the Spectra T120 LTO5 tape archive and TOPAZ will manage material handling with CEC’s existing video servers for seamless workflows.

TOPAZ sits in the centre of CEC’s digital operations managing their entire ecosystem. XT-Ingest performs baseband ingest, metadata entry and after PULSAR verifies the file based Quality Checker, TOPAZ controls the digital archiving and media asset management. Using drag and drop techniques, playlists created in SAPPHIRE will execute an efficient SD/HD file-based playout of CEC’s channels. Coupled with XT-Edit virtual editing, partial file extraction (PFE) and logging features will provide the program preparation tools. The end-to-end workflow solution will consolidate production and broadcast operations on one common platform, to digitally preserve content and simplify CEC’s broadcast operations.

Programme producers at CEC can create low resolution proxies, do virtual editing, browsing, cataloguing, metadata input, PFE and have HSM control of its entire digital archive. Masstech’s solution doesn’t rely on third party applications to achieve ingest of legacy content from video tapes. TOPAZ is equipped with Masstech’s in-house developed HQS transcode engine and a library of format blades to provide CEC with file interoperability.

The TOPAZ and SAPPHIRE system delivers performance on one common platform to make LTO tape archiving, HQS transcoding and content management accessible to the mainstream broadcast market.

Pankaj Arora, Managing Director, CDG Broadcast, the system integrator for the CEC project said:" We have partnered with Masstech for various projects like CEC because their software seamlessly integrates into one cohesive system taking care of all legacies. We are very impressed with Masstech’s flexibility and ability to meet the demanding operational requirements and that is what sets them apart from other solutions. Their open ended approach is key to the success of this project."