Telkom Indonesia is an Indonesian multinational telecommunications conglomerate with major businesses in broadcasting. Recently, as part of their continued expansion, the company issued an RFP to build SEA Today (Southeast Asia Today), an Indonesian English-language news and lifestyle television channel targeting Southeast Asian and international audiences with Magna Systems & Engineering winning as the successful tenderer.

Magna Systems Jakarta-based Senior Pre Sales Engineer, Maulana Alamsyah, explained, “Telkom Indonesia were already sending channels to Singapore, Malaysia, Japan and other countries so the new SEA Today channel had to meet and utilise the same high quality broadcast standards but had significant other technological requirements.”

Thanks to Magna Systems & Engineering, SEA Today is now a 24-hour ASEAN and Southeast Asia-Indonesian English language international state media and public broadcasting news television channel targeting Southeast Asian audiences.

Alamsyah continued, “In order to make SEA Today a success Magna Systems & Engineering provided Telkom Indonesia with a vendor agnostic solution that streamlines a fast news workflow and which also integrates with the company’s existing Vizrt MAM systems. Vizrt also now manages video processing for the news workflow from ingest through editing, sending to studio playout and archiving.”

Magna’s solution also includes an Octopus Newsroom (NRCS) system which is suitable for all newsroom types and sizes, from a single channel with just a few bulletins per day up to full-scale 24/7 news channels even with multiple locations.

The new channel also integrates an Imagine MOS Playout solution and has a Chyron solution integrated for its news graphics.

Octopus NRCS is a solution that is not tied to specific vendors and thus is free to integrate with any other systems such as MAM, studio playout and graphics. All of the SEA Today systems communicate via the MOS protocol.

Magna has now also provided full workflow capabilities for SEA Today including being able to ingest raw clips, enabling journalists to create stories and also insert all elements required within story including video and CG, editing raw clips, final checking by script editors and final approval by producers to send to playout.

Maulana Alamsyah concluded, “The new SEA Today channel is very efficient and very successful. Magna was able to manage the SEA Today project within a tight timeline and finish the project on time with the right resources in order to meet the client’s requirements for their specific workflow. Magna’s solution is very cost-effective and vendor agnostic and these key elements, along with the fast workflow we provided, meet all of the customer’s main requirements for their channel.”

SEA Today currently airs through Indihome TV on Channel 101 (HD), First Media on Channel 416 (HD), MNC Vision on Channel 336, MNC Play on Channel 17 and MyRepublic on Channel 572 (HD) in Indonesia, StarHub TV on Channel 720 (HD) and Singtel TV on Channel 15 (HD) in Singapore and Astroon Channel 504 (HD), Astro NJOI on Channel 504 (HD) and Unifi TV on Channel 651 (HD) in Malaysia.