NORTH ATTLEBORO, Mass.—North TV is a community media station serving North Attleboro,Mass. With three channels dedicated to community, government and education-related programming respectively, we provide a wide range of PEG content for our audience. We do everything from high school sports to news to school events and government meetings—altogether, about 600 hours of programming annually.
In the past, we performed most of our remote broadcasts from cable drops located in various parts of North Attleboro. We have five live drop areas from which we can do programming, but we’ll never be able to add to that. If we wanted to cover a school graduation, we could only do it if it was indoors—anything away from those drops was not possible.
We knew we needed a new solution that would let us broadcast from anywhere. I learned about the Comrex LiveShot online by searching for similar equipment, and it seemed like a solution that would work for us.
A QUICK STUDY
When we were ready to purchase, my staff and I saw LiveShot in person at an ACM conference in Minneapolis, and scheduled a demo shortly after. (The Comrex demo program allows anyone to try any piece of equipment free for two weeks.) Once it was installed, it was so simple to use that we purchased our own shortly after.
LiveShot is surprisingly easy to use. It’s simple enough that I can give a person here who’s never seen or operated LiveShot a 10-minute explanation of how it works and they’ll be able to operate it without a problem—that’s critical with the volunteers we have (our part-timers can operate LiveShot as well).
There’s always a learning curve at first, but once I learned the terminology, how to run tests and how connections work, it was easy.
Since beginning to use LiveShot, we’ve covered a range of live events in locations that weren’t accessible before. We’ve done Thanksgiving football live, outdoor graduations, high school Super Bowls from Gillette Stadium—this was never possible in the past. We’ve covered political forums where candidates speak outside live, meetings, anything you can think of. The results have been great.
LiveShot is the right system for us and has worked out wonderfully. We’ve used it in high pressure situations, events that we advertised heavily and if it didn’t work, we would have looked really bad. But I have enough confidence to let the community know about it, and it’s always worked. I highly recommend it.
Chris Miller is the director of operations for North TV. He can be reached at cmiller@northtv.net.
For more information, visit www.comrex.com.
