Working with customer feedback is an important part of Azimuth Soft operations, which results in the development of our solutions’ functionality.
Recently we decided to talk to Tudor Bologan, the CTO of the TV8 station in Moldova, about the systems the channel uses to automate their workflows, and why they made the choice to go with Azimuth Soft.
TV8 is one of the largest socio-political TV channels in Moldova, broadcasting digitally nationwide and included into the must-carry multiplex.
Before Tudor joined as CTO and the Azimuth Soft NewsHouse NRCS was commisioned, the channel had been working without any automation. The broadcaster’s staff grew, and to better organize the production environment, automate routine processes and improve efficiency it was decided to implement a modern NRCS.
Tudor, having worked in broadcasting since his youth, starting at the Jurnal TV channel, knew about Azimuth Soft’s automation offerings but did not have a chance to work with them due to the lack of financing. So later on, moving up the carreer ladder to the CTO position at TV8, he decided to purchase our solutions.
“After coming to TV8 I fulfilled by dream of implementing a full-scale news production automation system”.
We asked the CTO to tell us about his experience running the Azimuth Soft NewsHouse NRCS.
Tudor told us that they never encountered any technical problems when preparing and playing out newscasts in NewsHouse. When incidents occurred due to human error on behalf of the broadcasters’ personnel, the issues were rapidly resolved by the Azimuth Soft support team that was on-call 24/7. The Azimuth video servers are working reliably, and the modular architecture of the NewsHouse NRCS gives TV8 the possibility of scaling and growth at any time.
The systems’ installation would not be possible without the involvement of Moldova-based highly professional integration partners, namely Vizual Impact SRL; O-Video Group SRL and personally their CEO Andrey Zapsha, who know their customer’s needs very well indeed.
When asked how well our systems meet the market’s expectations, Tudor replied that Azimuth Soft offered the best value for money and the systems satisfy all the broadcaster’s requirements.
The personnel training process went with some difficulty, as, like we mentioned before, there was no newsroom automation in place before the NewsHouse solution was implemented. The journalists wrote their stories’ texts in word processors and passed them on, not participating in the actual TV production. The “carrot and stick” method had to be used to explain the importance of workflow automation to the station’s staff. Tudor’s multiyear experience with broadcasters allowed to make that process as painless as possible though.
Due to his deep knowledge of the market and experience with transnational vendor’s solutions, Tudor realised that the running costs for major vendors’s systems can be very high. He also noted the long reaction time from their support departments and the problems with spare parts delivery. For example, the storage arrays from some vendors accept only drives sold by the vendor itself, and the shipping time for those can reach several months. Thus, a potential failure of multiple components within a short time can be a major risk to the systems and the whole broadcasting operation. On the other hand, for the Azimuth Soft solution Vizual Impact usually was there with the replacements on the next day.
We thank Tudor for this conversation and for the vote of confidence, and we wish the entire TV8 staff best of luck and new achievements! And we’ll always be there when you need us.