Televisual: Saudi Publishing Company

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Read how Televisual's customers use Asset to lower their cost of content ownership.

Saudi Publishing Company

Saudi Publishing Company founded in 1977 and based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia operates one of the most powerful Asset systems in the world. As the largest publisher of Arabic language newspapers in the world,

Saudi Publishing Company produces a prolific amount of content. In addition to its nine Arabic language newspapers, published seven days a week, it also publishes daily titles in English and Urdu. Its flagship product, Asharq Al Awsat has a circulation of over 300,000. As well as daily newspapers, Saudi Publishing Company has over ten weekly and monthly publications.

Although based in Riyadh, Saudi Publishing Company is a truly global company, with printing sites in London, Casablanca, Madrid, Dhahran, Frankfurt, Jeddah, Marseilles, New York and Kuwait in addition to Riyadh.

Saudi Publishing Company has a history of vision and innovation. The company was the first daily newspaper to move to PostScript in full production. It’s worldwide satellite communications network is as advanced as any in use by any newspaper publisher. Now it is turning its vision of a distributed asset management system feeding a global content driven e-commerce system into a reality with Televisual’s Asset technology.

The Asset system is the second installed by the company. In June 2001 the company installed the first Arabic language Asset system in its London office. This now has over half a terabyte of content archived, and is growing by over two gigabytes a week. The Riyadh system will augment this system as the company implements a network of distributed content management systems across its major offices.

The Riyadh Asset system is installed on three servers. Two IBM Xseries 360 clustered servers host an IBM EXP 300 RAID 5 storage array to provide the central Asset archive with automatic failover to provide continuous operation even in the event of a hardware problem on the primary server. The third server is an IBM Xseries 300 which will be used to provide ecommerce facilities on the company’s web sites.

The priority for Saudi Publishing Company is to build an archive of its daily titles. It will feed all published pages as Adobe Acrobat PDF files. These will be taken from the page pairing system and, using iStructure as a management tool, fed into the Asset database for automatic free text indexing. Pictures will be streamed automatically from a Transtel News Manager system into Asset, using the IPTC captions to index then automatically.

Saudi Publishing Company has a content base to build on. The Asset system is already loaded with ten years of Asharq Al Awsat which have been scanned and key-worded from bound volumes. This will supplement the two years of electronic material in the London based Asset system. The company also plans to scan its historic picture library into the Asset system.

Last Updated: Tuesday 16 May 2006 - 15:42

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