Omneon, Inc. today announced that BBC World Service has selected Omneon Spectrum™ media servers to provide ingest and playout for its new news-based Arabic TV service, which will reach viewers in 22 countries across the Middle East. The free BBC Arabic satellite and cable television channel, with studio facilities in the U.K., launched in March with 12 hour service that will expand to 24 hours in the summer.

At the center of a tapeless workflow at BBC Arabic TV, one Spectrum system ingests 13 channels while the second Spectrum system delivers the main service to air, making full use of its 10 output channels across a redundant pair of playout servers under IBIS ServerPlay control, interfacing with DaletPlus News Suite, an AP ENPS newsroom system, and Vizrt graphics. Deployment of the Spectrum servers enables the new broadcaster to take advantage of the systems’ rock-solid reliability to ensure broadcast continuity, an open architecture that enables tight integration with other best-of-breed systems for optimal workflow efficiency, and modular design to allow easy addition of capacity and features without disruption.

“People all over the world trust the BBC to provide reliable information, so we are particularly pleased that they have trusted us to provide such an important part of this new system,” said Geoff Stedman, senior vice president of marketing and products at Omneon.

BBC World Service has placed an order for two additional Spectrum systems to be deployed for ingest and playout for the forthcoming BBC Persia TV channel, which will launch later this year.

The BBC first began broadcasting radio news to the Arab world 70 years ago and now operates a multimedia news service for the Middle East and North Africa with a measured audience of more than 14 million on radio and online.

The industry's most scalable, reliable, and cost-effective video server, the Omneon Spectrum system sets the standard for media production, playout, and archive applications.

About Omneon
Omneon is a leading provider of flexible media server and active storage systems that optimize workflow productivity and on-air reliability for the production, distribution, and management of digital media. Omneon is a pioneer in the use of advanced IT technologies and open systems for broadcast applications, producing a modular and expandable video server architecture in the Omneon Spectrum. The company's MediaGrid active storage system delivers centralized content storage that is scalable in capacity, bandwidth, and media-processing power. The company has an extensive global presence with customers in 45 countries on six continents. Omneon is on the Web at www.Omneon.com.

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