Evertz Brings It All Together For PBS

With a wide array of products that address video production as well as signal processing and distribution seperately, Evertz is now combining some of those products into integrated solutions that are pre-configured to work together and save broadcasters on resources and operational costs. The company is also offering the largest HD-SDI router, at 2,304 x 2,304 I/O matrix, on the market today.

This, according to Mo Goyal, director of product marketing at Evertz, means products like its Mediator (asset management), MAGNUM and MAGNUM VUE (routing and master control functionality from a single software-based interface) and VistaLink Pro) SNMP monitoring and control) are now able to reach into and manage—and control—more parts of a station’s facility and allow a single user o have virtual control at their fingertips.

“Customers are asking for more integrated solutions, so we’re giving it to them in a very intuitive form factor,” he said. “We’ve always been good at managing specific parts of the content chain, now we’re bringing those parts together for the benefit of the engineering and production team.”

Pieces of this integrated strategy went into the building of a new Joint Master Control Center for

New York State’s public television stations, located at WCNY-TV/FM’s new Broadcast and Education Center in Syracuse, N.Y. The stations have formed a new entity called Centralcast LLC that is made up of nine New York public broadcasting stations. The group has partnered with Evertz to provide a turnkey solution that will allow it to automate the on-air operations for 35 television channels across New York State and New Jersey.

The Joint Master Control Center will feature Evertz’s Playout and Content Management solutions, which include the Mediator and OvertureRT LIVE for playout; Evertz SuperNAS for storage; EQX and EMR video/audio routing; Evertz 7812 conversion gear; MAGNUM and MAGNUM VUE for unified facility control; VistaLINK for network management; 7881ENC-H264 for contribution encoding and 3480 series for ATSC encoding.

The nine New York PBS stations that make up Centralcast LLC, the largest consortium of independently owned and operated public broadcast stations in the United States, are WCFE, WCNY, WNET, WLIW, WNED, WMHT, WPBS, WSKG and WXXI. The new services are scheduled to launch, in October 2012, with WCNY as the first location to go online.

By forming Centralcast LLC, the New York State PBS stations are looking to save $25 million over 10 years by consolidating equipment, operating, and maintenance costs. They also hope to create additional revenue opportunities by offering master control services to other broadcasters and develop a “self-sustaining model” through which the stations are not fully dependent on capital campaigns from their communities.

“In order to truly achieve our goals and reach true success, we needed to move away from the traditional broadcast model and shape a new one that reflects the realities and technology that exists today,” said Robert Daino, President and CEO of WCNY and a member of Centralcast LLC. “Leveraging the data driven, workflow based solution from Evertz will result in reducing the project risk significantly while increasing flexibility, performance, and scalability of our overall solution.”

“Evertz and Centralcast will be introducing the ‘control room of the future’, where content managers will operate in a monitoring by exception mindset,” said Romolo Magarelli, CEO of Evertz. “We’re excited to be working with the Centralcast LLC team, who have embraced the technology and looks to introduce new models in order to advance the industry’s broadcast architecture.”

The end-to-end solution that Centralcast will use features Evertz Mediator for content management and playout automation; OvertureRT LIVE for playout; Evertz SuperNAS for storage; EQX and EMR video/audio routing; Evertz 7812 conversion gear; MAGNUM and MAGNUM VUE for unified facility control; VistaLINK for network management; 7881ENC-H264 for contribution encoding and 3480 series for ATSC encoding.