NETIA Grows Middle East Business With Installation for Saudi Arabia Ministry of Culture and Information

CLARET, France - Feb. 9, 2009 - NETIA today announced that its business in the Middle East broadcast market has grown significantly over the past year through key installations of the company's television and radio content management solutions. Among these high-profile projects is an installation for the Saudi Arabia Ministry of Culture and Information ( MOCI), awarded to the Stesa-Thomson consortium.

NETIA played a key role in this project, not only providing MOCI with the tools necessary to restore, digitize, and preserve audiovisual media of cultural and historical importance, but also ensuring the interoperability of media management systems across this complex installation. To support this installation in Riyadh, NETIA, through the Stesa-Thomson consortium, interfaced its system with a full backup storage system provided by EMC2 in Jeddah. The archives will include 200,000 analog tapes from Riyadh Radio, 290,000 analog tapes from Jeddah Radio, and nearly 7,000 analog tapes from Dammam. To accommodate this volume of material, MOCI will use 24 ingest systems.

Preservation of national archives is a primary concern of MOCI, and the equipment supplied by NETIA provides the high level of quality MOCI desired for preserving and digitizing audio assets. The equipment and process proposed by the Stesa-Thomson consortium, including NETIA, have received the quality certification of INA (Institut National de l'Audiovisuel), a world leader in the archiving, digitization, and safeguard of audiovisual assets.