Emir Hadziahmetovic
COLUMBIA, S.C.—WIS television is an NBC affiliate and part of the Raycom group of stations. We have been serving this market since 1953. and are the local news leader here.
Like many stations, we've been working in recent years to migrate our operations from analog to digital—with all of the budgetary, technical, and logistical challenges that entails. For us, the best approach to the digital migration has been a gradual one where we could adapt services as required. Snell's IQ Modular infrastructure products have proven absolutely critical in this approach, as they've allowed us to introduce new system components as needed, and in a manner that's completely compatible with our changing infrastructure.
IN EVERY SIGNAL PATH
The IQ Modular line has evolved significantly since WIS began using the modules in the late 1990s. Today, the IQ platform provides a comprehensive range of both video and audio conversion modules specifically designed to smooth the way for an analog-to-digital migration. We rely on IQ Modular components for virtually every aspect of our operation, including distribution, conversion, audio processing, audio embedding/de-embedding, SD-to-HD conversion, and video processing.
An important part of our IQ installation is Snell's control and monitoring capability, which provides us with integrated monitoring and control capabilities for all IQ and other Snell products.
IQ BRINGS MANY ADVANTAGES
The variety of IQ modules from Snell has enabled us to design a very flexible operation that we can easily adapt as our requirements change, and the stability of the modules ensures that our signals have minimal jitter—an important consideration, especially for our HD broadcasts. And having our entire plant under the control of a single real-time monitoring and control system is a definite advantage, making it easy to configure specific functions and to combine parameters from different modules.
For instance, if we experience a delay in an audio processing signal, the IQ audio delay unit can compensate and bring the audio back in sync with the video, a task that would be difficult if we had equipment from multiple vendors within the audio and video processing path.
We're still moving ahead in our transition and will continue to design and install audio and video processing and conversion systems based on IQ Modular components as we continue to finalize the digitalization of our plant, unify station technologies, and simplify workflows. The modules have proven to be instrumental in our step-by-step conversion to digital operations, enabling us to approach the challenge gradually and cost-effectively, and with minimal impact on production.
With the IQ Modular infrastructure, we believe WIS is well-positioned to maintain its leadership in our competitive marketplace.
Emir Hadziahmetovic is chief engineer at WIS television, and has been with the station since 1994. He may be contacted at ehadziahmetovic@wistv.com.
For additional information, contact Snell at 818-556-2616 or visit www.snellgroup.com.
