WATERLOO, Ontario—Abu Dhabi Media is using 14 Dejero EnGo mobile transmitters and four WayPoint 104 receivers for its ongoing coverage of the Expo 2020 culture event in Dubai through the end of March.

Expo 2020 is the first international expo to be held in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia region in its 170-year history. The event is hosting 192 countries at dedicated pavilions around the exhibition center. A total of 25 million visitors are expected to attend over six months.

Ideal Systems, the local systems integrator, was commissioned to build Abu Dhabi Media’s purpose-built, state-of-the-art five-camera studio and gallery at the Expo 2020 site. Five wireless cameras are being used to capture content from the pavilions.

Four EnGo mobile transmitters enable Abu Dhabi Media production crew to contribute live footage and interviews from the pavilions to a WayPoint receiver at the studio on site. The transmitters also provide real-time voice communications between the director in the studio and the presenter on the ground. 

“The Expo 2020 exhibition area is huge at 45,000 square meters [484,375 square feet], so the logistics of running fiber lines from location to location or installing antennas for satellite connectivity within a building of this size would have taken up huge resources in terms of installation, maintenance and cost,” said Jean Claude Rahme, head of OB at Live HD, a government media entity supporting event coverage.

“With EnGo, connectivity is very straightforward,” he said. “We regularly encode at up to 20 Mbps from the pavilions because we are able to use six point-to-point SIM cards to aggregate IAD connections from Etisalat cellular networks and achieve full coverage inside the building. Because we use EnGo mobile transmitters, there are no limitations when it comes to line-of-sight to satellite antennas nor do we have to rely on a single private network.”

The Dejero EnGo uses the company’s Smart Blending Technology to create resilient internet connectivity. It aggregates multiple networks into a single service, allowing transmission of high-quality live video with glass-to-glass latency as low as 0.5 seconds over boned cellular connections. 

“Dejero was the best solution for us,” said Rahme. “Not only does it provide more flexibility and mobility for our production crew on site, it also gives us completely reliable connectivity – both with our studio at the Expo and our headquarters in Abu Dhabi – which is crucial to the speed at which we can gather the content in order to build and deliver our daily morning and evening programs.” 

More information is available on the Dejero and Abu Dhabi Media websites. 

DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES—Imagine Communications provided its services to Abu Dhabi Media (ADM) by installing a business continuity playout site with full premium channel functionality. This disaster recovery system uses Imagine’s playout, automation and software products and is run on ICT service provider du’s Media Cloud platform. With this new facility, ADM has also revitalized its premises-based playout operations.

The workflow, which was officially launched in October 2016, is distributed across two facilities. Schedules and schedule updates from Imagine Communications’ Broadcast Master traffic system are communicated to both to an ADC automation platform in Abu Dhabi and a Versio playout software in Dubai. Scheduled content not cached in the cloud is called for by Versio.

ADM also has the ability to show live programs at its remote site due to the addition of the SelenioFlex Live. The addition of the encoder for the live feeds allows content to be streamed into the Versio engine, ensuring seamless playout of all content.

In addition, Imagine and du helped supply the remote facilities with graphic capabilities that are compatible with ADM’s traditional facilities through Imagine’s ChannelBrand software. This enables graphic templates to be called and populated by the schedule.

ADM will continue to work with Imagine to upgrade its existing facility to the new virtualized platform.