Fana selected Netia's Radio-Assist™ digital audio software suite

Netia announced on 7 January that Radio Fana, Ethiopia's first national commercial broadcaster and multilingual radio station, has selected Netia's 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.

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 programs 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 digitization of tape-based content.