PacificAus TV is a program of the Australian Government that complements a range of initiatives to enhance Australia’s engagement in the Pacific. Free TV Australia was selected to work with Australian commercial free-to-air television networks and Pacific Partner Broadcasters to supply premium Australian content across the Pacific. The initiative enables additional Australian content to be provided to existing Pacific broadcasters for them to broadcast within their programme schedules. After a comprehensive RFP the winner of the end to end managed services and playout tender for PacificAus TV was MediaHub Australia.
The objective of the PacificAus TV initiative is to make the broadcast rights to a variety of Australian television programmes available to Pacific broadcast partners in Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, Kiribati, Tuvalu and Nauru. This includes 1,000 hours of content per year for three years including lifestyle programmes, factual programmes, children’s programmes, drama, reality TV and sport.
MediaHub CEO Alan Sweeney explained, “Free TV released an RFP to the greater broadcast industry and MediaHub Australia won the tender process. This means we now supply content acquisition, aggregation, playout and distribution services in order to deliver the 1000 hours of content per year to nine Pacific island nations at a Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 99.99%. The core requirement is to provide the functionality to receive content from the commercial metropolitan networks, various production companies and sporting organisations such as the AFL and NRL. We also aggregate this content to playout 5 to 7 hours per day and uplink that content to the Intelsat 19 satellite. All of the content is transcoded and uploaded to the MediaHub ExchangeHub portal for the Pacific Island broadcasters to download the programs as VOD assets.”
Once the RFP and contract stages were completed, the timeline for on-air was very tight. That said, by using their significant expertise and knowledgebase in the areas of channel management and playout, MediaHub was able to have the PacificAus TV service operational in just six weeks.
Free TV’s Shane Wood said, “It was impressive to see the MediaHub team deliver this project so quickly and with such a great degree of flexibility and agility whilst working collaboratively with Free TV, STS, the Australian commercial FTA broadcasters and the partner Pacific broadcasters.”
MediaHub’s suite of end to end Managed Services fulfill all of the PacificAus TV broadcast requirements including content aggregation, programme preparation and media management, presentation playout, satellite delivery, transcoding, compliance recording and even the creation of a web portal service for the Pacific Island Broadcasters to download content from.
Sweeney added, “We furthered our partnership with Sydney Teleport Services (STS) to provide the satellite delivery of PacificAus TV to the Pacific Island Broadcasters. By using MediaHub’s patented, fully redundant, low latency-high capacity video and data services network, FibreHub, we connect the MediaHub playout centre to the STS uplink earth station which then manages the encoding, satellite uplink, encryption and transponder space.”
Since the PacificAus TV initiative went live MediaHub has ingested, added metadata to and QCd over 1500 programmes and over 1000 hours of content from multiple providers into the MediaHub MAM system in under four weeks.
