SRG-TPC Switzerland chooses Skyline Communications’ DataMiner for its new all-IP broadcast facility

TPC, the technology arm of Swiss public broadcaster SRG in charge of TV, radio and multimedia production for SRF, has trusted in DataMiner for its new innovative news, sports and technology center in Zurich.

The Skyline Communications solution will be responsible of the complete management of the media data center, from ingest to media asset management and master control room up to the playout. The system looks after areas such as infrastructure, virtual machine, operation systems and media software applications individually, but also is aware of the complete workflow of the processes.

All monitoring solutions of SRG SSR will be migrated towards DataMiner to ensure operational continuity across all SRG locations. The broadcaster will be able to take advantage of other benefits of the tool, as its proactive monitoring.

This is how Bart Reynaert, Sales Manager at Skyline Communications, describe the implementation of DataMiner at SRG-TPC: “The first step is to monitor all new systems in the new technical center and to integrate already existing systems to be visible. All the different levels of information will be aggregated in order to be displayed on the monitor wall. In other words, DataMiner allows operators to intuitively manage and control any device, software function or media service from a single pane of glass.”

“We will also deliver our highly innovative and awarded DataMiner Service and Resource Manager (SRM) suite.“This state-of-the-art solution will be used to monitor services dynamically, end to end, cutting straight across all vendor and technology boundaries. In order to do so, DataMiner tightly integrates any product from any vendor, either interfacing directly with those products or alternatively via domain or vendor-specific controllers, such as the BFE broadcast controller and the Nevion VideoiPath software. DataMiner receives event information from the broadcast controller and exchanges media flow information with the other controllers in the system. Combining all of this with the vast amount of additional metrics collected from the underlying physical and virtual infrastructure, such as PTP information, DataMiner creates rich and dynamically updated visuals of all services, their performance and availability metrics, and their flow through the infrastructure”.

“As such, Skyline’s DataMiner is truly unique because the system integrates with literally any product from any vendor, including open specifications like NMOS IS-04 & IS-05, which is crucial for TPC as this gives full freedom to go for a best-of-breed solution. With the end-to-end DataMiner platform, the technical center in Zurich will be able to tackle the challenges that accompany the move from SDI to IP.”

“That is indeed one of the key strategic reasons we decided to go for DataMiner,” explained Andreas Lattmann, CTO at TPC Switzerland. “We are aiming for a true future-proof, full-IP SMPTE ST-2110 UHD/HDR-ready system with open standards so that we are entirely free to select only the best-of-breed components, today and any time in the future. Another huge factor in this decision was the previous successful partnership with Skyline for our new all-IP UHD OB truck. And in general, whereas in the past end-to-end management might have been considered as a nice-to-have, today it is simply an absolute must to be able to deal with the complexity and volatility of an all-IP and highly virtualized media operation.”