Grass Valley Adds Archiving Capabilities to RTS's Newsroom

In 2003, RTS installed Grass Valley Profile® video servers and an open SAN to support 30 NewsBrowse™ Edit stations, five NewsEdit™ stations, and three NewsQ™ Pro craft editors. The system was designed to be flexible and future-proof, and since then it has been extended to include further browse resolution encoders and support for RTS’s choice of file-based acquisition format. The storage network has also been boosted with the addition of high resilience server redundancy.

Now, RTS has identified the need for a deep archive, choosing FlashNet technology from SGL to meet its specific requirements. Drawing on the flexible architecture of the Grass Valley digital news production system, RTS called on Grass Valley’s professional services team, along with local distributor RTC, to provide the systems integration.

Systems architects from Grass Valley worked with RTS engineers to define, in advance, the precise workflow and data integration requirements. The solution was then reproduced to the satisfaction of RTS in factory tests, before being implemented on site. This system solution is also supported by a Service Level Agreement (SLA) for the ongoing year of operations.

“Our choice, made eight years ago, for Grass Valley to provide our newsroom solution has proved wise yet again,” said Nenad Cukalovic, Executive Director for TV Technology at RTS. “As our requirements have grown, and our newsroom technology platform has developed to support it. When we needed to add a heavy-duty archive we knew that the open architecture of the Grass Valley system would allow it to be integrated seamlessly.”

“One of the most significant changes affecting the broadcasting industry is the move from ‘customer and supplier’ to ‘trusted partners’,” said Aengus Linehan, Senior Vice President of Global Services at Grass Valley. “This is a great example, where RTS made a selection of an archive product which met their requirements, confident that we would not just make it work but make it appear as an integral part of the workflows they rely on every day of the year. That sort of trusted partnership, where a broadcaster can turn to Grass Valley for accurate advice as well as professional services, is being increasingly relied upon by our customers.”

This latest addition to the RTS newsroom in Beograd, which includes full archiving and restoration functionality, has been live since April 2011.