Qatar Radio moves onto Radio-Assist 8.1
Published: MEA
QATAR: National broadcaster Qatar Radio has taken all five of its main channels live on Netia’s Radio-Assist 8.1 digital audio software suite. The Netia software is also being used as a disaster recovery solution and replaces an existing radio automation product. According to the manufacturer, it gives the broadcaster ‘a more extensive and unified solution that addresses the entire production workflow’.
‘If I were to define the three key characteristics of Radio-Assist, I would say that it is an efficient, reliable, and stable solution,’ said Mohammad Al Mohtaseb, system engineer at Qatar Radio. His colleague Mohammed Qaddoumi, system engineer for audio broadcasting, also underscores the system’s efficiency and adds that the software's Air-DDO broadcast tool has proved particularly valuable. The technical team at Qatar Radio selected Radio-Assist after performing site visits and extensive testing and evaluation of the software.
Systems integrator Media Group International coordinated Qatar Radio’s full migration to Radio-Assist 8.1, overseeing the copying and conversion of all media, along with associated metadata, into the Netia software system. All this was done without interrupting operations and without losing any of the broadcaster's 275,000 elements and assets.
With this shift, Qatar Radio has been able to bring all radio production and broadcast functions onto a single platform. The Radio-Assist 8.1 software supports coordination, scheduling, and live broadcasting, as well as an archive of more than 300,000 hours of programming.
The software is installed on 34 workstations across two sites — Qatar Radio's main broadcast facilities and a disaster recovery site — and used by 80 staff members on a daily basis. The software supports one principal channel broadcast in Arabic, another dedicated to Quran programmes, one channel in French, one channel in English, and a channel broadcast in Urdu. The transition of these channels onto Radio-Assist was achieved progressively over the course of a year. Early in the project, Netia provided training for both administrators and users.