Patrick Brand is Sales and Marketing Consultant at Technicolor (Entertainment).
Eredivisie Live is the major football TV outlet in The Netherlands that broadcasts all the Dutch Premier League matches and much more.
After running for two seasons in SD playout, technical partner Technicolor Netherlands was assigned this year to build a brand new HD multi-channel playout at the Media Park in Hilversum.
For the automation of the acquisition, media management and playout Pebble Beach’s Neptune was chosen by the system architect of Technicolor, Jurriaan Wittenberg. This choice was made after a period of research, keeping in mind both the views and wishes of the client and the end users.
The Neptune 3.8 automation system at Eredivisie Live controls 10 channels, all in HD. The system provides ingest, playout, browse, and archive workflows and integrates with the scheduling and graphics software, and the new upcoming VOD platform.
Marco Bouwhuis is one of the directors at Endemol who works on Neptune with Technicolor’s operator Patrick Kuhlman on a daily basis. Both are very satisfied with Pebble’s solution: “We have one channel running on a 24-hour per day basis and we scale up to more channels when the soccer matches are being played,” said Bouwhuis. “On average we run four to five channels with approximately 350 items each during a match day or evening. We are now able to do this with only one director and one or two operators in our play out facility.”
“Technicolor was very demanding on the new play out automation,” Patrick Kuhlman continued. “Both Technicolor and Endemol demanded an automation system with an outstanding track record that could seamlessly connect to our database and peripherals. We already used an earlier version of Neptune in our SD play out but were willing to change in case of a better alternative. Fortunately, the new version of Neptune is able to meet the new requirements easily.
“Apart from the fact that Neptune is extremely reliable we found it really effective for our typical workflow. The people at Pebble Beach created some really nice features that help us to perform faultlessly. The user interface and screen layout of Neptune is flexible and works perfectly well for us. When we have nine matches broadcast simultaneously on nine channels we only need to use three clients to keep a clear view of the current and upcoming items, a very nice overview to have on days like that!”
