FOX Turkey, one of the country’s leading free-to-air general entertainment channels and a regional affiliate of News Corporation, is upgrading its playout infrastructure to the latest signal processing and distribution technologies from Grass Valley. The channel’s goal was two-fold: to expand its overall capabilities and to enable the distribution of high definition (HD) content to its subscribers to ensure the best customer experience.
Grass Valley engineers, working with FOX Turkey, have designed a fully networked, server-based infrastructure allowing the automated ingest and playout of HD content as digital files. This will make FOX Turkey staff more productive in the way its infrastructure now handles media and introduces a new level of flexibility and staff collaboration.
“In making the move to full HD operations, we needed an integrated platform that is reliable and flexible enough to let us to expand and easily add new services as required to keep our business competitive,’ said Necip Kircin, CTO, FOX Turkey. “We recognise that moving to a file-based system will help us both now and in the future and Grass Valley was the best solutions partner, given its vast experience in this area, to work with us. We have worked with Grass Valley in the past and look forward to continuing this mutually beneficial relationship.’
The total Grass Valley solution not only helps FOX Turkey future-proof its operations, but ensures a fast return on investment by enabling the organisation to expand its offerings almost immediately. FOX Turkey has purchased, and is in the process of installing, numerous Grass Valley K2 Summit media servers which will be all networked and deployed as a storage area network (SAN).
“Working with FOX Turkey exemplifies the best type of vendor-customer relationship, where we both work together to overcome challenges and to reach the project’s goals,’ said Alan Wright, senior VP, Europe, Middle East, and Africa for Grass Valley. “When you combine the HD migration technologies and knowledge of Grass Valley with a company that truly sees the benefits of a file-based system, then it’s a win-win for both of us. We look forward to our continued relationship with FOX Turkey.”
