The Ministry of Information Affairs is a government-owned organization in the Kingdom of Bahrain. It runs several TV and Radio stations to cater to the country’s requirement of general entertainment. Bahrain TV is one of them and it is in the middle of a modernization process of the direct TV broadcasting system. And part of this modernization framework is these two OB vehicles.

Bahrain TV’s OB vans are controlled by Lawo’s VSM broadcast control and workflow solution in combination with VSM servers in a redundant setup at the heart of the control system.
Dubai-located system integrator Broadcast & Studio Solutions (BSS) equipped the OB vans with high-definition TV broadcasting technologies. Thanks to the vsmSTUDIO software, all administration and configuration tasks can be programmed and saved. Additional VSM hardware includes GPIO interfaces, UMDs for dynamic labelling, and SmartHubs, which convert control signals from serial to TCP/IP and vice versa. SNMP Monitoring capabilities are provided by the vSNMP editor software tool, which runs on a separate server.

The audio infrastructure integrates a 48-fader Lawo mc²56 audio production console with 384 DSP channels, a routing capacity of 5120×5120 mono channels, plus local I/Os directly available at the audio desk. An additional mc² Compact I/O system provides an abundance of remote I/Os. The smaller OB van carries a 24-fader mc²36, again with a multitude of remote and local I/Os controlled by 192 DSP channels via a 512×512 matrix.