Etere for RAI Sport

RAI, a long-time customer of ETERE has once again renewed its confidence and selected ETERE for the management of RAI Sport.

RAI Sport, RAI digital and thematic satellite station, broadcasts exclusively sports and commercials. Born in 1999 and since then it has been broadcasted by using the ETERE software. After already 3 years of its perfect and continuous working, the installation needed an update.

An absolute news, against the previous system, is represented by the fact that there is no post-production room but only the On-air room and the operator who produces the video asset to be broadcasted. Only thanks to capacity of ETERE, the leading company in the sector, a great optimisation could be obtained whether from the human resources whether from economical ones.

ETERE furnished the automation software.

Video files of sports events come from a tape or from a live transmission. According to this type of program, which is variable considering the evolution of events, the 8 hours long programming is hardly to be automated, apart from the commercials.

The system manages two Grass Valley Profile video servers, connected through a fibre channel, where one of them is the main server and the other one is backup, which is used in case of emergency.
ETERE Media Manager software checks and switches The Main and the Backup Profiles and also “intelligently duplicates” contents between the video servers. Operators can record on any Profile, and ETERE will take care of broadcasting the correct schedule.

The ETERE system foreseen two different phases:
- recording;
- replication.

While recording in about 8/10 hours of daily broadcast, ETERE ‘feels’ all effected operations by the operator on the master control and virtually “divides” the recording in different programs. This operation is particularly sophisticated, and ETERE interfaces with both operator and the RAI scheduling system, so to create a complete metadata schedule. The replication that occupies the rest of the day is different from the original one because different parts are sectioned, “remounted” and integrated by different transmissions, and all this to adequate to the whole audience at any time.

The system is completely redundant, and it interfaces with the RAI Trade commercial management system so to allow changes even before the On-air.

Different from the previous system, RAI Sport migrated its database towards the SQL platform, that is, major speed and data safety.