Hungary’s RTL Goes On Air With Aveco ASTRA

PRAGUE, CZECHOSLAVAKIA: Aveco, a broadcast facility content management and automation solutions specialist, announced that RTL Hungary is on the air with Aveco’s ASTRA Suite of Tools. RTL has 47 TV channels and 29 radio stations in 10 countries. RTL Hungary simultaneously broadcasts SD and HD channels by controlling two separate broadcast chains (switcher, logo inserters, etc.) with only one playlist, greatly simplifying the whole operation and workflow.

The RTL system integration group supervised the choice of automation system while Hungarian system’s integrator Rexfilm performed the actual integration. They designed and installed the complete ASTRA solution which is tightly integrated with mirrored Grass Valley K2 Summit video servers, a Grass Valley Trinix router, Miranda ImageStore and logo inserters, various VTRs, a Sony LMS cart machine for mass ingest, and Front Porch’s DIVA archive, along with a variety of other signal processing equipment.

To facilitate RTL’s transition to HD and file-based workflows, ASTRA’s Content Management System performs all the media asset management. ASTRA retrieves files from the archive as needed based on the playlist and sends them to the video server for playout. ASTRA will also send files to archive manually or based on predefined user rules. On ingest, ASTRA can perform batch or scheduled records and will automatically add metadata as needed. It also provides a QA facility for adding, editing, and verifying metadata crucial to RTL’s file-based workflow.

RTL is Aveco’s fourth installation in Hungary which includes Story TV, Szombathely TV, and VIVA.