Iraqi-Owned Al-Baghdadia Builds New HD Service With Harmonic

Al-Baghdadia, an independent Iraqi-owned Arabic-language satellite channel based in Cairo, has selected Harmonic equipment for its Egyptian Media Production City facilities to enable a smooth transition to HD.

Supplied by Cairo systems integrator AV Solutions, Harmonic’s market-leading Spectrum media servers, together with the WFS file-based workflow engine and ProMedia Carbon file-based transcoders, give Al-Baghdadia a flexible, reliable, and cost-effective solution for delivering a higher-quality service.

“Al-Baghdadia needed a redundant, reliable, expandable, and future-proof server system that could meet its ingest and playout requirements both today and tomorrow, resulting in a lower total cost of ownership,” said Omar Hussein, broadcast IT manager at AV Solutions. “Only Harmonic’s proven technology fulfills all of these requirements, and as Al-Baghdadia moves into HD, expert service from Harmonic also will be valuable in ensuring a smooth migration.”

AV Solutions has installed a Harmonic ingest and playout solution that integrates new Spectrum systems with the WFS workflow engine and ProMedia Carbon transcoders. The first Spectrum system supports tape and live ingest, with WFS streamlining both file ingest and proxy generation. Another Spectrum system is used for playout under the control of Pebble Beach automation (also available from Harmonic as Polaris Advance), and is deployed in a 1+1 mirrored configuration to provide full redundancy managed by the MAS platform. Because the Spectrum system features I/O support for a wide range of codecs and built-in up/down/cross conversion, it enables back-to-back playout of SD and HD content to air, thereby allowing Al-Baghdadia to leverage all of its media assets within its new HD services.

“The Spectrum media server system has played a central role in countless facilities’ migration to HD,” said Ian Graham, vice president of sales, EMEA, at Harmonic. “Its performance, innovative integrated functionality, and reliability continue to make it the go-to choice for today’s broadcasters.”