Equity Media Stores on Omneon

Equity Media Holdings, the TV station group based in Little Rock, Ark., is moving and storing its content with Omneon equipment.
Equity is using the Omneon MediaGrid system for active online storage, and the Sunnyvale, Calif., server maker’s Spectrum system for ingest and playout for 70 of its 120 stations.

The system is handling content for Equity’s Retro Television Network, a library network developed as a secondary digital multicast channel and adopted by several non-Equity stations. RTN is expected to be broadcast by more than 100 stations by year’s end.

The Omneon’s are also handling Equity’s Central Automated Satellite Hub system. The C.A.S.H. system replaces local station master control because it manages accounting, spot inventory, promotion, and production functions.

Chuck Stanley, Equity Media chief engineer, said the Omneon array allowed a single copy of a program to be simultaneously run on several stations because the system handles transcoding and quality issues.