MUMBAI: Imagine Communications has completed a major broadcast facility upgrade at Ten Sports, which is part of Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd (Zeel).

Ten Sports’ new broadcast facility, recently relocated from the UAE to India, relies on an end-to-end sports production and playout solution, and supports the production and distribution of its entire family of channels.

The solution includes the Imagine Communications D-Series automated content management and distribution system controlling Nexio playout servers running Nexio Motion and Insight software that create automated processes to move and manage media. Ten Sports executes ingest, asset management and playout on a Nexio Farad high-performance online storage network with intrinsic mirroring for absolute content security.

Ten Sports vice president of engineering Sanjeev Bhargava said, “Our existing IT infrastructure was dated and consisted of independent islands of storage, which lacked fast throughput - slowing the entire ingest to playout process. We selected Imagine Communications to enable us to build a more efficient workflow capable of handling the demands of modern day sports production, from ingest through to playout and archive. Furthermore, as our parent company, Zee Entertainment, is also an Imagine Communications’ playout solutions customer, we knew this solution was robust enough to meet our exacting requirements.”

“The Nexio IconMaster is a key component of the system and is exclusively used by our sports channels, streamlining the function of fade-in/out during live switching from one event to another - a feature that is extremely important in a sports production environment,” he added.

“There are many factors to consider during any relocation and upgrade. For Ten Sports, this included the ability to work with a single supplier to provide the end-to-end technology and have this underpinned with local support. For a group that has eight sports channels covering regional and international sporting events, keeping the facility on air during the relocation and upgrade process was critical,” added Imagine Communications regional sales manager for South Asia Raj Yadav.

Imagine Communications also provided the core infrastructure at Ten Sports, including the Nexio IconMaster branding and master control switcher.