Popular regional playout centre in Jordan to transition from SD to HD with new servers and infrastructure

Imagine Communications, empowering the media and entertainment industry through transformative innovation, has secured the contract to transition the playout facilities at Jordan Media City (JMC) in Amman, Jordan, from SD to HD. The first phase of the expansion will allow JMC to add six new ART HD channels to support its growing roster of international clients.

JMC was established 15 years ago as the first private media city in the Middle East, providing state-of-the-art technology and experienced staff for regional and international clients. Today, more than 400 channels are broadcast from the facility, which links directly to Arabsat, Nilesat, Yahsat and AsiaSat satellite platforms covering the different regions. The expansion will help JMC to answer increasing demand for HD-quality programming in the region.

At the heart of the JMC installation will be Imagine Communications’ Nexio® servers. The Nexio AMP®, a UHD-ready platform, delivers exceptional reliability, flexibility and format transparency while providing HD-SDI ingest, preview and playout. Nexio Farad™ centralized online storage will enable true shared access for fast on-SAN editing for Apple Final Cut Pro® editors. The Farad storage network’s intrinsic mirroring functionality provides resiliency, ensuring high availability of the platform.

Along with the new storage network, Imagine Communications is supplying its Platinum™ VX digital video router, as well as its monitoring, conversion, synchronization and test and measurement solutions. The JMC system will also incorporate Imagine Communications’ Nexio IconLogo™ high-definition channel branding system to provide downstream branding for the new channels. The Imagine Communications solution is easily scalable and designed to accommodate additional expansion in the future.

“As our business grows, we are looking to provide the highest-quality services to our clients while simplifying our workflows to remain operationally efficient,” said Faris Abdullah, CTO at JMC. “We have worked with Imagine Communications for more than 10 years, and we know the company has reliable products and excellent support in the region. They will deliver what they promise, and will ensure we get on air on schedule.”

Paul Wallis, sales director for the Middle East and Africa at Imagine Communications, commented, “Over the course of our longstanding relationship we have seen JMC grow into a world-class facility, now ranked in the top 20 globally. We are proud to be playing a critical role in the next phase of JMC’s continued maturation. Crucial to the success of this latest installation is the continued investment by Imagine Communications in a strong design and support group on the ground in the Middle East, which understands the real issues of the customer and can react quickly.”

The ART channels are scheduled to go on air in spring 2016.

###

About Jordan Media City (JMC)
Jordan Media City is a state of art media service provider located in Amman as a free zone company. Making the best use of Jordan’s geographical location between Asia, Africa and Europe, JMC has become a regional hub for media organizations, providing Teleport, OTT services, Production, Technical and anti-piracy monitoring, Transmission facilities (SD, HD playout centre), AD-HOC fiber links to satellite and satellite to fiber , and internet connectivity with all Jordanian ISP providers. Visit www.jordanmediacity.com for more information.

About Imagine Communications
Imagine Communications empowers the media and entertainment industry through transformative innovation. Broadcasters, networks, video service providers and enterprises around the world rely on our optimized, future-proof, multiscreen video and revenue enablement solutions every day to support their mission-critical operations. Today, nearly half of the world’s video channels traverse our products, and our software solutions drive close to a third of global ad revenue. Through continuous innovation we are delivering the most advanced IP, cloud-enabled, software-defined network and workflow solutions in the industry. Visit www.imaginecommunications.com for more information, and follow us on Twitter @imagine_comms.