Marjan Television Network Improves Content Workflows With Primestream's Xchange MAM
Marjan Television Network, a major Persian-language broadcaster based in London, has upgraded its media asset management (MAM) and production asset management (PAM) capabilities to the award-winning Primestream Xchange platform. Xchange will work in concert with Marjan’s existing deployment of the Primestream Workflow Server to enhance content access and bring even greater efficiencies to both local and remote production crews.
Marjan Television Network was founded as a free-to-air channel in 2010 by Kayvan Abbassi and Marjan Abbassi. Today, Marjan is a general entertainment channel with international reach and a full lineup of documentaries, films, and series as well as news programming. As an end-to-end broadcaster, Marjan commissions, produces, edits, and plays out its own content over its linear TV and VOD services. The network reaches 120 million viewers across Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and West Asia, with significant viewership inside Iran that rivals other satellite channels including BBC Persian and VOA Persian TV.
“As a fast-turnaround, topical, entertainment-centric channel, we have relied on Primestream’s acclaimed solutions to streamline all of our media workflows for over a decade. Primestream supports all of our requirements from live studio multicam ingest all the way to transmission,” says Alex Battrick, broadcast operations manager, Marjan Television Network. “Therefore, when it came time to upgrade our MAM capabilities and take the next step in evolving our postproduction workflows, we knew Xchange would tick all the boxes. Xchange gives our ever-expanding production crews much more flexible access to content assets as well as remote workflow tools.”
At Marjan Television Network, the Primestream Workflow Server provides the broadcast automation infrastructure for ingest, playout, and production operations — meeting the bespoke needs of the channel and its individual production workflows. Now, Xchange provides a MAM/PAM layer that empowers remote workers and drives project workload management, asset management, and user accessibility.
“Xchange offers an immediately easy-to-use interface, which cannot be overstated when providing a service that has to meet the needs of news journalists and technical digital asset managers alike,” adds Battrick. “Plus, Xchange’s project-centric approach makes media management effortless, allowing users to archive or restore entire projects and all associated assets with a single click. Through single-service access, ease of use, and streamlined workflows, Xchange has made Marjan team members more effective and allowed them to focus on what’s important: making creative content.”
In addition to the Xchange core software, the Marjan installation consists of 70 Xchange clients for journalists and producers as well as 70 integration clients for postproduction stations and editors working in Adobe Premiere Pro. Xchange offers tools for project progress monitoring, proxy edit workflows, and remote collaboration including access to content via an HTML 5 web interface. Through integration with Marjan’s existing LTO storage library and production storage infrastructure, Xchange offers seamless access to archived content, and a redundant database server ensures high availability of content and business continuity. This means journalists, producers, and editors are able to control their own assets from user upload and ingest all the way to log and edit, and they are able to archive footage without the need for an entire media support department.
“Marjan Television is a pioneering TV brand that has grown over the past decade from a small breakout channel to the world’s premier Persian-language network. We’re proud that Primestream solutions have powered Marjan in every stage of its development,” said Claudio Lisman, president and CEO of Primestream. “Now, with the upgrade to Xchange, Marjan is an even broader showcase of our industry-leading solutions — demonstrating how they can manage end-to-end media workflows from ingest through to editing, playout, and archive access for easy repurposing of content.”