Red Bee Media takes over playout for BBC Persian and Arabic TV News
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Editor
| 05 May 2020

Playout operations for two of the BBC’s global news channels, BBC News Arabic and BBC Persian, which serve significant parts of the UK public broadcaster total distribution have been outsourced to global media services company Red Bee Media.

The two channels reach 33 million Arabic speakers and 16 million Persian speakers respectively each week. The BBC News Arabic TV channel reaches Arabic-speakers in the Middle East and around the world. It launched in March 2008 and broadcasts 24 hours per day with a mix of live news and pre-recorded programming. The Persian-language channel is aimed at audiences in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and diaspora audiences around the world. It was launched in January 2009 and broadcasts 24/7 with 9 hours of live content every day.

The migration cutover took place in cooperation between Red Bee and the BBC, during the global spread of Covid-19. Yet Red Bee notes that the project and migration took place as planned and on time during the unusual circumstances caused by the Covid-19 outbreak, where Red Bee and the customer’s project staff cooperated remotely, and with operational staff practicing social distancing with their respective control galleries.

“We are very proud to add the playout management for these channels to the services we provide for the BBC,” said Red Bee CEO Steve Nylund commenting on the project. “Our role as a managed services provider is to offer our customers peace of mind through operational reliability, so that they can focus on their content and their viewers. We are happy to have been awarded that trust again from one of our longest standing partners.”