India’s Captain Media Pvt. Ltd. Chooses EVS for News Production Infrastructure

EVS, a provider of broadcast and media production systems for sports, news and TV entertainment, has announced that Indian television network, Captain News, has deployed EVS solutions for its entire news production set up. Captain News chose the integrated EVS system for ingest, production and playout.

Captain Media Pvt. Ltd. decided to upgrade its production infrastructure to increase its ingest, playout and storage capacity to cater for its new Captain News Channel. After extensive evaluations on site, Captain Media selected EVS solutions based on their performance, video management capabilities, and integration with the ENPS newsroom system. As well as supplying and integrating a complete EVS environment, EVS also provided training to Captain News’ staff.

“With EVS we have a flexible, integrated system that encompasses everything we need for our news channel from ingest to playout,” said Mr L K Sudhish, managing director, Captain Media. “The EVS system expands our production capabilities while delivering the performance and reliability we need for our 24-hour operations.”

A four-channel HD-ready EVS XS server is used in an open configuration for news ingest as well as by Captain News’ studios. Four reversible channels are controlled by EVS’ IPDirector suite of video management applications including the Ingest Scheduler module, and the Playlist Panel module which enables Captain News to edit and control playlists with features such as transitions, loop functions and start modes. EVS’ Xedio Dispatcher application is used to ingest content from ENG devices and for clip selection, logging, storyboarding and file rendering. All ingested material is sent to and stored on a 7.2TB EVS XStore NAS with a RAID 5 recording capacity of 240 hours of SD at 30Mbps, or 72 hours of HD at 100Mbps.

Six IPDirector IPBrowse modules provide an easy way for journalists, producers and editors to search and review media, compile clips, and export them to pre-defined targets. For news production, IPDirector’s MOS Gateway Server is used for interfacing with the ENPS newsroom computer system. The entire database is fully redundant and under the control of the EVS environment. Captain News uses a mix of editors including Final Cut Pro.

The final edited material is played out through a four-channel HD-ready XS server controlled by IPDirector’s Playlist Panel. Captain News has also deployed two 1TB removable storage devices for IPDirector for HDD-based archiving of content with metadata.

“EVS solutions are ideally suited to newsroom operations, as demonstrated by Captain Media’s decision to expand its existing infrastructure with a complete EVS environment,” said Jérôme Wauthoz, product manager, EVS. “Captain News is the first South Asia customer to join the rapidly-growing list of top news broadcasters across the globe that rely on complete EVS news solutions.”

Captain TV, which is part of Captain Media Pvt. Ltd., is a 24-hour television channel that offers a diverse mix of high-quality programmes. Founded in April 2010, it broadcasts primarily in Tamil, with a mix of other Indian languages and English. As well as entertaining viewers, it’s also committed to educating them about the country’s economy and improving awareness of global affairs.