LRT televizija, the flagship television channel of the state owned Lithuanian National Radio and Television (LRT) group, has upgraded its ageing Newsroom Computer System (NRCS) with a system from Octopus.
As a state broadcaster, it was necessary to put the NRCS procurement out to tender to ensure LRT televizija was getting the best value for money and had the necessary combination of cost, quality, features and ongoing support.
Ričardas Baltaduonis, head of internet department at LRT televizija, explained: “We tested various newsroom systems but, in our opinion, Octopus was by far the best in terms of collaboration, GUI and ease of use. We felt some systems we tested were created by humans but were not for use by humans.”
The Octopus platform is architected on a fully redundant system and a critical element of its success has been its full integration within LRT’s existing setup. This included integration with the current Vizrt graphics platform, DVS servers, Avid MAM and the prompting system from Vitek.
The Octopus system is a collaborative newsroom tool that is accessible from anywhere, on any device and at any time. From creating and editing rundowns, to accessing archives and other information sources, it is the one stop platform for journalists and the rest of the news team. It supports a wide range of features from creation to research of stories, to interview creation and facilitating live broadcasts.
Baltaduonis continued: “If you get it wrong, then the impact can be catastrophic. We are very pleased with the Octopus implementation, its positive impact on our daily operations and the ongoing support we enjoy from Octopus.”
Kalvis Baumanis, CEO at system integrator Hannu Pro, said: “For this project we developed a removable media ingest and proxy generation solution for different ingest sources, including Sony XDCAM, Panasonic P2 and drone footage. In addition, we developed the Hannu Pro MOS gateway and API services allowing us to bridge our own Hannu Pro removable media ingest solution with the existing LRT Avid MAM and the newly deployed Octopus NRCS. For the transcoding workflows, the removable media footage enabled the ‘stitching’ of files by merging many ingested raw files into a single file by deploying Telestream Vantage with its Vantage Analysis platform.”
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