Our team was commissioned to design and deliver the Ukweli TV new broadcast facility from conceptualization to realization. Ukweli Tv originated from Ukweli Video Productions which was founded on 18 May 1981 by a Maryknoll Missionary, late Fr. Richard J. Quinn, as one of the first professional Christian video production centers in Africa with the aim of evangelizing through electronic visual images, later on, the Chairman of the Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops (KCCB) – Commission for Social Communications and the Bishop of Kakamega Diocese Rt. Rev Joseph Obanyi, on 1st April 2020 launched Ukweli Catholic Television (Ukweli TV) at Radio Waumini premises in Kasarani, Nairobi.
Ukweli TV needed to have a complete tv workflow that included 2 Studios, Production Suites, MCR, PCR, Central Technical Room, and Administrative Offices. Different brands from various broadcast equipment manufacturers were deployed on the workflow to achieve the results needed in bringing up a modern, scalable and flexible TV workflow in Post-production, Playout, and Contribution to DTT Head-end.
The Station was built for Digital Television Terrestial (DTT) and Over The Top (OTT) Transmission. The feed from the studio was contributed on leased fiber line to SIGNET DTT platform which then distributed the signal across the country on Free-to-Air (FTA) channel access and YouTube provided an online streaming platform for OTT channel access.
Ukweli TV was built on a complete IP architecture using Jamiro Broadcast MCRPack Innovation design. The solution is built on a highly customized, assembled hardware server with the ability to convert SD or HD SDI streams into broadcast-quality, SMPTE-compliant RTP/UDP streams or vice versa. CINEGY made this possible by providing the back-end application software. This made it ideal for their broadcast operations that received a large number of external Christian channel feeds in baseband SD/HD-SDI from Vatican City. Incoming SD and HD RTP streams from satellites, playout devices, and network sources were registered in a server and distributed across the facility on a Gigabit switch for real time monitoring on Multiviewer, Live video switching, and Ingest.
Our MCRPack Innovation is capable of Capturing two hundred or more streams, managed and routed simultaneously. Individual streams can be accessed from any point in the network, without generation loss. By Virtualization, we substantially reduce the individual hardware components in the MCR by running multiple instances of your broadcasting tools inside virtual machines, eliminating the worry (and expense) of redundant systems once and for all.
The signal from the MCR was Encoded and compressed in Standard Definition using CINEGY Air which provided a Multicast UDP/IP transport stream for the Digital Video Broadcasting – Terrestrial, Head-End contribution on a leased optical fiber line and Online Video Streaming to YouTube from a Gigabit switch which enabled stream monitoring throughout the broadcast facility. The MCRPack registry provided a parallel UDP/IP transport stream for the backup program which can be used as a secondary and backup contribution feed to the head-end. Ukweli TV signal was then distributed across the country on SIGNET DTT platform and can be accessed using any free-to-air DVB-T2 Compliant Decoder or any television with an internal Digital Tuner.
“MCRPack is the first all-IP Virtualized MCR solution innovated by Jamiro Broadcast in 2019, and as such it represents the successful realization of an ambitious vision encompassing SDI-IP migration. With our MCRPack, Ukweli TV can leverage on future signal distribution using SRT, which is offered in the package,” says Benson Nyaga, Technical Director -Jamiro Broadcast.
