Operated by the Department of Defense (DoD), the DMC is located in Riverside, Calif., and manages the AFN Broadcast Center (AFN-BC), which provides stateside radio and television programming -- “a touch of home” -- to approximately 800,000 U.S. service men and women as well as DoD civilians and their families serving outside the United States in 177 countries and aboard Navy ships at sea. The DMC‘s Observer system includes 40 SD-SDI channels for monitoring the outbound transmission integrity of all AFN radio and television broadcasts. The Observer system will automatically ingest, reference, and recall all as-run traffic data and correlate that data against logged media. In addition, Observer will log and proactively alert operators to transmission defects such as loss of audio and video, static or black video, and loss of closed captions.
By logging onto the LAN via their own PCs, DMC operators will be able to search for and retrieve video clips by closed caption data, channel, date and time, as-run logs, and custom data sources. Along with proactively diagnosing and correcting transmission faults, operators will also be able to easily extract clips for quality control review and equipment failure analysis. In addition, a local quality control station will allow technicians to review content for the accurate placement of cue tones channel-by-channel and system-wide using a tone decoder.
“The DMC is an excellent example of the growing numbers of media organizations that are moving away from traditional broadcasting technologies and towards digital, file-based systems running in the existing IT environment,” said Julius Perl, vice president of marketing at Volicon. “State-of-the-art solutions such as the Observer are enabling this strategy, by making it easy for operators to access, monitor, share, and analyze media assets and data right from their own desktops.”
More information about Observer, Observer RPM, and other Volicon products is available at www.volicon.com.
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About the American Forces Network
American Forces Network® (AFN) operates and distributes distinct radio and television channels to a worldwide network of overseas U.S. Department of Defense broadcast affiliates, outlets, base cable TV systems, and AFN Direct-to-Home satellite dish users. The AFN offers nine television services and an on-air program guide channel, all of which originate at the Defense Media Center in Riverside, Calif. These services include: AFN|prime Pacific, AFN|prime Freedom, AFN|prime Atlantic, AFN|news, AFN|sports, AFN|spectrum, AFN|family, AFN|movie, and AFN|xtra. A 10th service, the Pentagon Channel, is produced by Department of Defense Public Affairs in Alexandria, Va., and is distributed along with the AFN services. AFN is a service of the American Forces Radio and Television Service (AFRTS®).
About Volicon
Volicon develops and markets turnkey digital video archiving and streaming solutions, including the award-winning Observer® multichannel video monitoring and logging system, for the television broadcast and telecommunications industries, cable programmers, cable MSOs, and corporate and government markets. Volicon‘s proprietary video processing system, comprised of a video encoder and streaming engine, gives a large number of users simultaneous access to multiple channels of video content over a network. More information is available at www.volicon.com.
U.S. Government procurement of the Volicon Observer does not imply endorsement of Volicon or its products. All trademarks appearing herein are the property of their respective owners.