Globo TV Expands Automation across Brazil with Pebble Beach Marina
Brazil’s Globo TV, part of Grupo Globo, is one of the largest media companies in the world. The organisation continues to migrate its legacy playout automation systems to Pebble Beach Marina. Already installed in the company’s Rio de Janeiro headquarters, generating Globo’s main feed along with Globo International, the newest Marina installations are located in São Paulo, Brasília and Recife.
Mirroring the Rio infrastructure, the Marina system in São Paulo automates playout from three servers, with four ingest channels and 12 playout channels – generating four playouts per feed. The São Paulo facility generates the São Paulo state and capital feeds while another facility in São Paulo is currently being configured to provide DR (disaster recovery) for the Rio, Brasília and Recife operations with real-time media and playlist synchronisation. The Brasília and Recife broadcasting operations each supply one channel to their respective local regions.
“After successfully installing Marina in Rio last year, we decided to continue migrating the legacy automation systems in our other broadcast centres,” said Eduardo Ferreira, Director of Technology Distribution and Playout at Globo TV. “Our goal was to better integrate our sites with a common workflow for each. This gives us greater agility with content and metadata exchange while also optimising all of our resources.”
Marina’s standardised automation platform establishes integration across Globo’s regional playout centres with real-time online updates from Globo corporate systems. Marina also introduces extra operational efficiency by automating content exchange and strengthening disaster recovery options. Globo’s new file-based workflow has replaced the use of physical media for content delivery, confirmation and playout, and completely automates media transfers and replication across sites and devices, in accordance with Globo’s business rules.
“The Globo team evaluated several factors before continuing migration to Marina, including the system's ability to integrate with Globo’s proprietary grid planning system interface,” said Marcelo Blum, systems manager at Videodata, the systems integrator responsible for recommending and installing Marina. “Managing content throughout the process, a solid integration with tapeless systems and media, complete redundancy and resiliency, together with performance were the key requirements.”
As well as the Marina installation, Videodata also integrated Telestream Vantage and Dolby VM-600 as part of Globo’s complete set-up.
Marina allows operators to view high-res media clips so they can preview, trim and approve media directly in the Marina user interface. It allows last minute playlist changes to be made reliably and makes airing of breaking news at the same time fairly simple. Comprehensive timers make it possible to continuously adjust the schedule, in order to comply with ongoing strategic decisions. Globo also uses Lighthouse, a Marina web client interface, to visualise status monitoring and remote playlist control. www.pebble.tv
