Indonesia’s MD Entertainment chose Imagine’s Versio platform to support playout at their newly acquired channel, helping to speed up the launch and go to air within three months.
PT MD Entertainment Tbk is Indonesia’s first publicly listed film production house and takes a prominent role in Southeast Asian media. The company recently acquired the television channel NET TV, subsequently renamed PT MDTV Media Television (or MDTV), as part of a strategic expansion into television broadcasting, wanting to bring high-quality productions to free-to-air TV programming.
Ambitious Timeline
MD Entertainment brought to the project an ambitious timeline and the goal of stable, scalable infrastructure across the channel. They chose Imagine Communications’ Versio integrated platform to support playout, helping to speed up the launch of MDTV’s broadcast operations and go to air within just three months. That was partly due to familiarity – Imagine’s systems had already been in use at NET TV.
“Imagine Communications’ convenient, local support was another factor when we chose a technology partner to help meet our short- and long-term requirements,” said Bambang A Nugroho, vice president, technology, MDTV. “Our understanding of the Versio platform’s reliability at other local installations gave us confidence, and its ease of integration brought the stability we needed to hit the launch window without compromising our goals.”
ADC automation
The initial deployment at MDTV has a 1+1 redundant Versio integrated playout system with SDI-based outputs, graphics capabilities and embedded instances of Imagine’s ADC content management and distribution automation software, which integrates with other devices and business systems and includes a web-based master control surface. MDTV can set up ADC to launch more channels, initiate new media workflows or enhance redundancy, and meanwhile the software makes scaling and commissioning relatively simple, and maintains a small hardware footprint.
Integrated Playout
The Versio integrated playout platform, also software-based, works as a turnkey system that handles functions from ingest and media asset management to playout, master control and graphics. It can be used either when building a new playout centre or when planning an infrastructure refresh, and is available as an on-prem server on COTS hardware or deployable in cloud-hosted environments.
Versio playout platform
The Versio system supports formats from HD-SDI and SMPTE ST 2110 to MPEG-2 transport streams, as well as SD, HD or UHD channels with HDR processing for those with mixed technical requirements or, through a hybrid approach, those transitioning to other standards. Versio is modular and scales to high channel densities and to more complex deployment and integration requirements.
Regarding graphics, Versio integrates rich, complex graphics including live rendering of text and DVE functionality. Users can import elements from After Effects and dynamic branding, and work across 10 layers with unlimited elements.
The Imagine playout system at MDTV was implemented in association with local Imagine Communications partner and systems integrator PT Alfatech Mediatama. A second expansion phase has been planned, adding ingest, motion graphics and media asset management. imaginecommunications.com
