MediaHub Australia wins GB News channel playout

MediaHub Australia (MHA) has won the contract and is now managing the entire playout for GB News, an Ofcom regulated news channel based in the UK.

MediaHub Australia CEO Alan Sweeney explained, “GB News released a playout RFP to the market and MediaHub’s response to the RFP won the tender process. After contract signing, MHA had just two months to bring and make the full television service operational for GB News, which I’m very pleased to say we did.”

This win for MediaHub is particularly significant for the company and for all broadcasters and content providers around the world as it proves that playout can now be seamlessly managed from Australia no matter where they are based across the globe.

Sweeney continued, “We had been discussing the technical possibilities of managing GB News’ playout with their CEO Angelos Frangopoulos for some time. Angelos was keen to recreate the playout solution we provided him with when he was Sky News Australia chief and we just had to prove it was possible.”

Frangopoulos’ and GB News’ requirements were for three linear channels – FTA, OTT and radio – to be delivered to various third parties. This included automated commercial insertion driven by the GB News studio in London.

MediaHub Australia chief digital and information officer Simon Scott added, “GB News has very high production values and is one of the UK’s premier news channels. With this in mind the playout solution we provided them had to be 100% efficient and seamless. MediaHub fulfilled all of GB News’ requirements by using our extensive experience in managing live linear channels to build a new set of infrastructure for them. All the live video feeds are SRT encrypted streams on-passed by GB News’ telco partner Arqiva, these feeds are then sent over discreet public internet and private cloud connections for ultimate efficiency, reliability and security.”

MHA takes all of GB News’ content including live-to-camera, pre-recorded, TVCs and promos and uses their proven workflow including MediaHub’s FibreHub Webconnect managed connectivity, ArkHub storage and archive and PresHub 24×7 multi-channel linear broadcast playout services to distribute the content back to the UK as a linear channel.

Scott continued, “The GB News studio is fed to MHA via redundant SRT IP streams and all promo and commercial content is delivered to MHA’s ArkHub storage. MHA’s playout system then generates the channel, including overlaying a live ticker (Vizrt Flowics) and other elements. SCTE triggers are inserted for the various providers downstream of MHA. The playout outputs then go to our Ateme Titan Edge encoding platform and that generates a number of renditions for the various GB News destinations, as well as return feeds back to GB News for confidence monitoring.”

When asked how MHA manages to execute this global workflow and keep the latency down, Scott explained, “MediaHub has been providing these types of services to many clients for many years. What may appear complex to others has been refined by MHA into a very efficient workflow and operation. That and the incredible progression of the power of the internet combined with low latency encoding and decoding using SRT connections enables the overall latency of feeds between the UK and Australia to remain ultra-low for any live presentation environment.”

As a result of their many years’ experience in developing and providing high level playout solutions, MediaHub has delivered a complex set of requirements in an extremely tight deadline for GB News.

Alan Sweeney concluded, “This workflow and playout solution we have provided GB News with is a global gamechanger. It is a culmination of MediaHub’s ten-year vision that has resulted in any content anywhere in the world now being able to be fully managed and played out from MediaHub’s HQ and data centres in Australia. As we did for Angelos at Sky News Australia and we continue to do for all of our clients across the world MediaHub provides all of our services with a guarantee of up to 99.999% reliability. We use the very latest cloud and data technology to provide any broadcaster across the globe with the most reliable and robust playout service possible. In short and in the world of playout, the tyranny of distance no longer exists as MediaHub has replaced it with a low-cost, seamless, reliable and ultra-efficient solution.”