Harris supports Seven Network Australia’s new playout facility

Seven Network Australia (Seven) has installed a file-based SD/HD playout platform at its Melbourne facility — which went on the air in June — based on technology from Harris. Seven is an independent, commercial free-to-air television network that operates primary HD and SD channels for the capital cities across Australia, reaching 95 percent of the population.

The launch of the Seven Network’s Channel 7TWO SD service was the first project completed under a new agreement with Harris that will see the addition of seven new channels.

At the heart of the new facility is the Harris D-Series playout automation system, which provides ingest, content workflow management and playout, with the ability to support from five to 1000 channels with built-in redundancy. On-SAN (storage area network), high-resolution editing is enabled via Velocity ESX editors, and Nexio servers provide file interchange support for existing media stored on Quantel Clipbox systems. The playout system also supports live program segmentation and automatic turnaround‚ which is critical for regional channel transmission. The company’s Platinum router and Centro multiviewer technologies are also part of the end-to-end system.

Andrew Anderson, general manager of Broadcast Services at the Seven Network, said the Harris ONE solution will allow them to update their existing broadcast systems and to further streamline the preparation and playout of content for existing channels.