In a multimillion-rand deal, M-Net has acquired a post-production broadcasting solution from Avid Technology SA, to bring the international reality-show Big Brother to South African viewers.
In association with global communications solutions provider Avid Technology Inc, Spescom Limited has formed Avid Technology SA. The company delivers and supports high-technology imaging and broadcasting solutions in the Southern African market.
Christa Lourens, manager: post-production at M-Net, says the company is a principal broadcaster on the African continent and views the acquisition of leading-edge technology as a critical component of its ongoing success.
"M-Net initially investigated upgrading its existing Avid non-linear editing equipment, which comprises five Media Composer suites originally supplied by Avid SA."
Since the companies were already engaged in a positive buyer-supplier relationship, M-Net saw Avid SA as the logical choice for technology provider, Lourens says.
She adds that the upgrade system's high degree of control and reliability made it the best solution in the marketplace.
However, producing the Big Brother show, to be broadcast six days a week, required networking and central storage technologies that enable real-time sharing of high-bandwidth media, Lourens explains.
Vast amounts of footage collected from 27 cameras installed in the 10 contestants' studio 'house' have to be edited down to a 24-minute programme for each day's show.
For this purpose, M-Net decided to acquire Avid Unity MediaNet, a shared storage device that allows video material to be edited from various editing stations.
Lourens says Unity's high-speed digital media network significantly improves workflow and enhances creativity by eliminating many of the mundane, mechanical tasks associated with managing the non-linear post-production process.
"Since all assets are stored on the hard drive, MediaNet virtually eliminates time consumed in handling and managing storage.
"It also allows significantly greater capacity and performance through the capability to utilise 100 disk drives or more, which translates to 2.1 terabytes of audio-visual storage."
The show, whose South African rights were bought by production company Magic Works, makes its debut on 26 August to introduce viewers to the world-famous phenomenon, and will be flighted for 106 days.
During a live Big Brother broadcast every second Sunday, the public will get the chance to vote unpopular contestants off the show, until the last remaining contestant walks away with R1 million in prize money.
Sean du Toit, business unit manager: Avid, says the technology to be implemented by M-Net is the first of its kind in Africa.
"Avid's Unity MediaNet solution provides unmatched flexibility and scalability in the non-linear editing environment and will greatly enhance M-Net's ability to speedily produce shows such as Big Brother.
"What networking has done for personal computers, Avid's media network technologies are doing for the video and broadcast environment," Du Toit concludes.
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Spescom Limited is an information and communications technology (ICT) company with operations in US, UK and SA.
The group is active in two main areas of the world IT market, namely offering product and solutions to connect to the networked economy, and the provision of software solutions to manage information and knowledge.
The strategic focus is on the convergence of knowledge, document, configuration and voice transaction management technologies.
Spescom holds the controlling interest in US-based Altris Software Inc, a NASDAQ-, OTCBB-listed company, and the developers of the award winning eB software.
In SA, Spescom, in alliance with world leading companies such as Cisco and Avaya, formerly known as Lucent Technologies, provides a range of customer contact and intelligent network solutions to its blue-chip customer base.
The company is a leading supplier of communications solutions and products to network operators and service providers on the African continent.
Spescom, through a joint venture with Siemens, is a world-leading supplier of revenue management solutions with installations in 42 countries, focusing on the prepayment of electricity services.
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