ASIA-PACIFIC BROADCASTING

SBS, Australia’s national multi--cultural and multi-lingual broadcaster, has completed another major step in its transition to fully file-based operation having successfully gone on air with its new Quantel Enterprise sQ system in Sydney.

The new system went live in August this year — right on schedule, according to the broadcaster, with all news bulletins now live with long-form production and sports scheduled over the next two months.

“The successful switchover to the Quantel system is the culmination of five years’ evolutionary change at SBS,” said Paul Broderick, SBS’ director of Technology and Distribution. “Our plan was to go to air with News on the Quantel system as soon as the World Cup was over, which was an ambitious timeline having only ordered the new system in February this year. Quantel has met all the milestones to date for installation, training and commissioning.”

The scale of the change for SBS was dramatic by any standards. “A few years ago, we were reliant on a very tired fleet of around 220 DVCPRO tape machines that served SBS very well but needed pensioning off. The switch to Enterprise sQ and other tapeless ventures such as non-linear cameras and a large automated archive has enabled us to remove around 160 of these machines from the operation,” Broderick added.

“As part of the transition plan, we put together a comprehensive training programme with 
Quantel which saw around 215 staff get fully trained in a very short timescale. This gave our staff a very high degree of confidence in the system which paid off in the smooth transition of each of the programmes to live operation with the Quantel solution.

“We were particularly impressed with how quickly Quantel rectified the inevitable issues that arose during the commissioning phase. Its prompt response ensured that the project remained on track while the SBS engineering team was stretched across this project, the World Cup and the Tour de France coverage.”

The final phase of the project involved transitioning SBS’s long-form current affairs and sports productions to Enterprise sQ, as well as Canberra, which went live last month, and Melbourne, early this October.
“Quantel’s ability to manage workflows between sites and across great distances was a major consideration when we made our decision earlier in the year. We are totally confident that Quantel will rise to that challenge in the same way and be there when we need them,” Broderick concluded.

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