CABSAT 2020, Dubai, 31 March - 2 April 2020, Stand G3-24: Leaders in intelligent storage solutions, GB Labs, will showcase its award-winning Mosaic automatic asset organiser and the new CORE.4 Lite operating system during CABSAT 2020 at the Dubai World Trade Centre from 31 March – 2 April.

The Mosaic asset organiser makes it far easier to quickly search for, retrieve, and view video assets. Mosaic automatically scans all inbuilt metadata and integrates it with AI tagging enabling the ability to store, catalogue and access assets with no need for manual intervention, making it a substantial time and money saver.

GB Labs new CORE.4 Lite operating system is a custom OS specifically designed to serve media files. Its high degree of speciality guarantees stable performance for every user, whether as workgroups or individuals, while maximising the efficiency of every disk.

A powerful new feature included with CORE.4 Lite is Analytics Centre, a dashboard that runs in the background of GB Labs intelligent storage devices and continuously analyses the network, providing complete visibility of exactly how, and by whom, data is being used.

GB Labs CEO-CTO Dominic Harland said, “Read/write speeds are usually compromised by a misconfigured network, which wastes resources. But configuration issues can be difficult to locate and resolve manually. Analytics Centre automatically analyses the read/write process through the network with specially designed algorithms that identifies, locates, and suggests how to resolve any issues, often before they occur, thereby eliminating the need for painstaking manual intervention.”

GB Labs will also demonstrate how its proprietary Dynamic Bandwidth Control identifies and selects high, medium, and low priority users to guarantee that the storage system automatically adjusts to operate at peak performance for all.

According to Harland, “Dynamic Bandwidth Control makes storage malleable to ensure it can flexibly respond to changes in usage priorities without breaking. This is unique to GB Labs and can be implemented whether storage is in use by one user or an entire workgroup.”

For backup and archiving, the exhibition stand workspaces will be coupled with GB Labs EasyLTO, an easy-to-use, cost-effective, all-in-one, high-speed solution.

Finally, the company will also discuss the success of recent GB Labs deployments to new customers including M for Media; Qatl Al Youm TV; Polimer TV; Craft; Kalvi TV; and Madha TV.

NINETNINE, the leading content provider to Cable and OTT platforms, has partnered with Samira TV, an Arabic channel available in Middle-East, North Africa and France, which specializes in cooking TV shows focusing on local cuisine. The two companies have produced the first French-Arab TV show, ‘Ezawj Errahal’ presented by French travel and food social media influencers Salim and Linda, known as “the traveling lovers” (Les Amoureux Voyageurs).

The 13-episode series launches on 14th February on Samira TV and will also be available on-demand and via OTT on Le Bouquet Maghreb, the leading Arabic TV package in France. The unique format will deliver an exciting, new TV cooking concept that will take viewers on a culinary trip around the world, allowing them to learn simple, original and mouthwatering recipes created by Salim and Linda while on their adventures.

Salim and Linda were the winners of the French popular TV competition format Pékin Express, which aired on M6 and attracted multi-million daily viewers. They became social media superstars and decided to travel the globe to meet people, discover new cultures and share their stories.

Medialease has won best ‘Asset Finance Intermediary’ at the Leasing Life 2019 awards, which brings together the most successful and innovative businesses throughout Europe in the leasing industry. 2019 has been a busy year for Medialease and the company was delighted to have been recognised for this award by industry-leading panellists.

The award judges commented that Medialease showed excellent growth and had a highly-targeted asset/industry focus, providing strong value to a very specialised end user. Medialease were also deemed to have very clear empathy and support to its chosen market, which is reflected in its exceptionally-high repeat customer statistics.

Medialease arranges asset funding tailored to the needs of the broadcast, film, television, AV and live events markets. Its relationships with many of its customers go back several years, with broadcasters and post-production companies returning to Medialease at each phase of their business plans to upgrade equipment or improve facilities. With a deep understanding of audio and video-based industries, the company supplies editing, grading and audio equipment for post-production facilities, along with the latest 4K cameras and location playout equipment for the world’s biggest sports and motorsports broadcasters. For further information, please contact us on 01327 872531 or visit www.medialease.com.

Cinematographer Si Bell and Director Anthony Byrne move crime drama series to a more cinematic look and feel

For four seasons, Thomas Shelby, his family and his gang — Peaky Blinders — have been captivating audiences around the world with this crime drama set in 1920s Birmingham, England in the aftermath of World War I. But the fifth season would mean a total change in how the series was to be shot, moving from Cooke S4/i spherical lenses (used since season three) to anamorphic with Cooke Optics' Anamorphic/i prime lenses as well as 4K for this season’s Netflix full-season distribution in the US, which became available on 4 October 2019 (UK distribution on BBC One began in early September with one episode per week).

One of the challenges for cinematographer Si Bell and director Anthony Byrne — both big fans of the series — was maintaining continuity with the four seasons that came before them, regardless of the new production changes.

“Anthony and I had wanted to do this series for a number of years, having watched all of it and always talking about it,” explained Bell. “When we got the gig, we both watched the entire series again and paid special attention to the things we loved, things we thought could be different and things we thought could be better. But we obviously had to keep continuity.”

Cobalt Digital today announced Chicago-based Weigel Broadcasting Co., which owns and operates stations in nine markets in addition to MeTV and other digital multicast networks, is using Cobalt’s software defined 9922-FS-DSP platform for openGear® frames to provide microservices for Emergency Alert System local insertion and CALM compliance for its terrestrial stations. Most recently, the company purchased five cards in March for KTLN, a Heroes & Icons and MeTV affiliate serving San Francisco (DMA #8).

“It’s one of the few cards of its kind that is flexible,” explained Kyle Walker, vice president of technology for Weigel Broadcasting. “It’s the Swiss Army Knife of cards. This card can literally do it all at the right price point.”

Weigel has deployed dozens of 9922-FS-DSP cards, which offer a combination of rich broadcast connectivity and flexible microservices that make them cost effective options for many applications. The +EAS option allows Weigel to key EAS text crawls into active video and insert station logos. Some stations also add the +TTS option, which provides Text-To-Speech conversion of EAS text.

Clear-Com® has appointed two new Regional Sales Managers (RSM) in North America. William Elliott takes over responsibility for the Southeast Region and Caribbean, while Vic Lombardi will handle the newly established North Central Region covering Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Nebraska, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. Pat Hamp, formerly RSM for the Southeast Region, has been promoted to a Sales Training Role focused on training Partners.

Leaders in intelligent storage solutions, GB Labs, will join its new partner, Chennai-based NCS Techno Systems, to showcase the advantages of GB Labs’ award-winning Mosaic automatic asset organiser and new CORE.4 Lite operating system during Broadcast India at the Bombay Exhibition Centre, Mumbai, from 17-19 October.

Argosy, a leading international supplier of broadcast cables and infrastructure products, has announced that it has relocated its Dubai office to the city’s Oudmetha area in order to hold more stock and deliver faster and more efficient services to its Middle East customers. The larger facility enables Argosy to locally stock higher volumes of its expanding product portfolio, such as racking and mains distribution units, video audio and data cabling, connectors and patching, SMPTE and fibre assembly equipment, along with KVM and network switches.

Broadcast Solutions, a leading media technology and system integration company, announced today that it had finalised the acquisition of Videlio Middle-East F.Z. LLC, the Dubai-based subsidiary of Videlio group. This new acquisition will merge with existing Broadcast Solutions operations in the Middle-East, led by Munzer Rushdi.

EasyBroadcast, a leading provider of end-to-end streaming solutions for TV channels, OTT service providers, and enterprises, today announced that it has invested in WAW MUSIC, the next-generation digital music service set to launch in Africa. WAW MUSIC's new streaming platform, WAW MUZIK, has already signed 10 million songs with Universal Music and will have Orange as its leading distributor. Partnering with WAW MUSIC opens up a new revenue stream for EasyBroadcast and strengthens its position in Africa, a continent with an annual growth of 42 percent in the OTT market.