9th annual Broadcast Engineering Excellence Awards winners
Mar 1, 2010 12:00 PM
More than 30,000 readers voted on this year’s state-of-the-art facilities.
TV Globo
Winner of new studio or RF technology – station
Submitted by
GLOBO Comunicação e Participações SA
Runners-up:
Oklahoma Educational TV Authority
Submitted by Axcera
WLII-TV and WSUR-TV
Submitted by AZCAR
Winner: GLOBO Comunicação e Participações SA
Digital terrestrial TV is being launched in Brazil with great success, reaching more than 65 million people in less than two years. However, Brazil is a huge country, and there are rural areas that will never be covered by terrestrial TV. Aiming to better serve the rural communities and digitize the analog satellite signal before analog technology becomes obsolete, TV Globo decided to develop a system targeted for rural areas based on GPS.
Project planning for TV Globo’s Digital Television for Rural Areas (TVDR) began in 2005. Checking its location through a GPS module, the set-top box will only yield TV GLOBO’s satellite signals in rural areas of Brazil.
In November 2009, this system launched in the Rio de Janeiro rural area and will subsequently be expanded throughout Brazil. TVDR will feature only one satellite national feed, but regional feeds will replace the national feed, region by region. A conditional-access system was developed for this project, linking geo-referenced maps to each regional feed. As each regional feed becomes available, the receivers located in the corresponding region will automatically choose it. If the location is outside Brazil, no signal will be decrypted.
To ensure the launch of the first signal in Rio de Janeiro, the technical team designed, integrated and tested the whole system in detail. The operational team was involved and trained throughout the process to facilitate the start of this new operation. The key components of the system are a conditional-access system from Nagravision, encoders and multiplexers from Cisco, a set-top box from Thomson, and a GPS module from Prime.
TVDR’s project team developed a system that will benefit the population of rural areas with digital quality and lend to satellite transmissions the regional aspects of terrestrial TV, while helping to eliminate rights issues and preserve TV GLOBO’s business model.
CBS
Winner of new studio technology – network
Submitted by
Pilat Media
Runner-up:
Trans Video Communications Studios’ NET
Submitted by Broadcast Integration Services
Winner: Pilat Media
CBS’ new Media Distribution Center (MDC) in New York City replaces aging, tape-based legacy equipment in the current Broadcast Origination Center (BOC) with HD digital file server-based scheduling and playout technologies. The MDC handles up to 80 inbound feeds and 18 outbound network feeds for program playout to U.S. affiliates. Fiber and satellite links connect the 19,735sq-ft facility to CBS Television City in Los Angeles, where scripted programs are prepared for air and disaster recovery operations are located. The MDC integrates live news and distributes live sports programs with regionalization as required and can support content for new media platforms such as CBS Sportsline, mobile TV applications and VOD services.
Key objectives focused on automating and streamlining the workflow for scheduling and playout operations and minimizing the potential for errors. CBS turned to Pilat Media’s Integrated Broadcast Management System (IBMS) for media management, program content scheduling and in-house technical facility scheduling.
By integrating its centralized, TV network enterprise-wide database and exploiting its integration capabilities with other systems, IBMS helps the MDC run at peak efficiency. Support for CBS’ legacy systems enabled IBMS to provide a smooth, progressive migration path to MDC functionality. Broadcast-relevant data flows into the IBMS system from a wide variety of interfaces. Commercial and promo information are received from the CBS sales system. Program format and timing information are entered into IBMS. The system also takes in data from a separate sales traffic system for The CW Network.
Media management is helping CBS migrate to a tapeless environment. The system processes acquisitions, logging the details of material received into the system and manages ingest of that material to servers. It also manages the MDC tape libraries within a single integrated environment.
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