Broadcast Integration Services (BIS) — a Union City, NJ, media technology, engineering, design and systems integration firm — was chosen by Viacom/MTV Networks (MTVN) in mid-2011 to provide design, installation, testing and commissioning services for a new Technical Operations Center (TOC) within their existing Network Operations Center (NOC) facility in Hauppauge, NY. BIS was selected, in part, based on the company's successful HD upgrade of MTV's Times Square Studios despite operational constraints and tight deadlines the previous year.
The TOC project's primary focus was to expand the channel capacity of the existing NOC with up to 64 additional HD/SD-SDI on-air streams. In addition, multiple virtual control room environments were to be added. The overall project encompassed expansion of the existing plant infrastructure, as well as its SDI routing, monitoring, broadcast-related IT control and ancillary sub-systems in order to fully support the increased channel count.
The new channels and related subsystems were designed as scalable "building block" platforms to provide a path for future growth and expansion, as well as to facilitate troubleshooting and maintenance. They were also configured to support the future migration of content infrastructure, such as archive, asset management and play-to-air systems. In addition, the TOC environment included a complement of "multipurpose" control rooms to be commissioned in parallel with channel growth. The control rooms also provided a diversified workflow environment with full redundancy and the flexibility to assign, monitor and control multiple channel clusters based on changing operational requirements.