Radio Fana, Ethiopias first national commercial broadcaster and multilingual radio station, has selected NETIAs Radio-Assist digital audio software suite.
Radio-Assist will enable Radio Fana to automate and streamline its entire content workflow from production to broadcast, including ingest, scheduling, editing, transmission, and archiving. This project is being conducted in collaboration with Fortune Enterprise Plc. in Addis Ababa and Radio Fana will represent NETIA's first installation in Ethiopia.
"Radio-Assist will integrate very well into our existing environment, and it will provide access to a robust set of tools for managing every aspect of our operation efficiently and cost-effectively," said Mulugeta Mahari, technical director for Radio Fana.
"All of these features, plus NETIA's excellent reputation and impressive list of industry references, made Radio-Assist the ideal choice for us," added Ato Woldu Yemessel, general manager for Radio Fana.
Operating from two main and two backup studios in the capital city of Addis Ababa, Radio Fana broadcasts a daily schedule of news, talk, and variety programmes in different languages like Amharic, Afan Oromo, Somali, and Afaregna (Radio-Assist's compliance with the Unicode standard provides critical support for Radio Fana's multilingual broadcasts). NETIA will install Radio-Assist on 30 workstations across all four studios and will cover every aspect of the station's content workflow. This includes an integrated news management system that enables automatic ingest of news wires coming from the Ethiopia News Agency, and an archiving feature that integrates with the production system to provide smooth and seamless digitisation of tape-based content. NETIA's DB SHARE provides automatic redundancy for all metadata produced by Radio-Assist and provides an extra measure of security for Radio Fana's database.
"We are very pleased that we were able to work with Radio Fana to tailor a solution specifically to its needs," said Mustapha Rezzoug, NETIA's Director of Products. "The multilingual support, integration of content from the local news agency, and digitisation of archives were all very important requirements, and all were easily met by our comprehensive solution."
