CobbTV, the government access television channel for Cobb County, Ga. recently acquired an automated playout system from Pebble, a global provider of automation, content management and integrated channel technology. The contract was negotiated in co-operation with, and was installed by Pebble’s systems integration partner, CTI, in Julyfor an on-air date in August.

CobbTV is available on Comcast cable and ATSC terrestrial. Along with county commission and other local government meetings, the programming includes educational and informational programming and, in rush hour, live traffic information including highway cameras.

The county authorities sought an easy-to-use, highly reliable automated playout platform, which would involve very low operational and maintenance overhead, according to Pebble. Following a procurement exercise, the contract was awarded to CTI and Pebble.

“To meet CobbTV’s particular needs, we proposed a very simple configuration,” said Eric Paris, Project Manager for CTI. “It uses a single Pebble Integrated Channel device which is capable of supporting four concurrent channels. Under the control of Pebble Automation software, it provides links to Cobb’s NAS media storage and manages live inputs and recordings.”

Video inputs and outputs are SDI, with the capability of 12G-SDI for a future move to Ultra HD. As well as switching and routing, the Pebble platform also generates and inserts rich graphics. It also includes audio channel management and mixing.

“We are a government body with needs slightly different than a traditional broadcaster, so our chief goal was to identify a trusted partner who would give us the reliability we sought,” said Brad Plumley, Station Manager at CobbTV. “Pebble is internationally recognized as a leader in broadcast automation, yet also took the time to understand our specific requirements.

“The solution they proposed is compact and cost-effective, but comes with the Pebble reputation for reliability,” he added. “It is packaged in a single box which reduces system complexity, and they have been implemented against our timeline requirements.”

Pebble CEO Peter Mayhead said: “This project is an important pointer of the way the media industry is transforming. Once the province of monolithic broadcasters, video is now seen as the route for direct communications by businesses, sports clubs and - as seen here in Cobb County—by public-sector bodies who want to ensure their citizens are properly informed.

“We designed our technology to be scalable, not just in the number of channels but in the level of operational involvement,” Mayhead continued. “That means for non-broadcasters like CobbTV we can provide the highest technical and operational quality and reliability with minimal operator or engineer involvement.”

For more information , visit pebble.tv.

BILLERICA, MASS.— Non-profit public, educational and government (PEG) access broadcaster Billerica Access Television (BATV) provides local residents with a compelling mix of community-created and station-produced programming. Like many PEG stations, we are concerned that viewers who “cut the cord” won’t see our content anymore. As such, offering our programming online is crucial.

When we replaced our station’s aging automation and playout system two years ago, tightly integrated streaming functionality was a big part of our purchase decision. We already offered online VOD through our previous system, but only in standard definition, and our VOD offerings were not mobile-friendly. We wanted to improve our online audience’s viewing experiences, delivering our content in HD through a better interface while also offering live streaming of all three of our channels for the first time.

We chose the Cablecast community media platform as the heart of our operations, deploying Cablecast Flex 4 and Flex Lite servers for our cable channels; Cablecast Live and Cablecast VOD solutions for creating our live streams and on-demand clips; and the cloud-based Cablecast Reflect service for reliably delivering our streams to web and mobile viewers.

Cablecast’s elegant online presentation and tightly-integrated publishing workflow were key factors in our decision. We looked at the public-facing VOD interfaces of all of the automation providers and liked Cablecast the best, and I can make our content available online without a lot of additional work. When I add a show to our schedule, I can also add it to our VOD library with one click, and indicate whether the show is permitted to be included in our live stream. The Cablecast platform automatically encodes the content and publishes it to our website, with nothing else I need to do.

Cablecast Reflect then delivers both our live streams and VOD clips to the public, minimizing the impact on our local network while ensuring reliability for our viewers. Reflect intelligently caches the content to the cloud the first time it is requested, taking the bandwidth burden off our own connection. The internet connectivity at our facility is not always reliable, so if we didn’t use a cloud-based service, I imagine the viewer experience would be dreadful at times. With Cablecast Reflect, we don’t have to worry about it. We know that we can serve as many viewers as want to see our streams even for our most popular programs, and no matter what, our content will stream out cleanly for them. While our previous system also delivered our VOD clips through the cloud, Cablecast Reflect has again proven superior. Our streams start up faster with no buffering before or during the stream, all while improving the visual quality of our content through HD delivery.

Now that we are reliably streaming live in HD, we have started encouraging people to watch our channels online. We’re currently only able to offer SD on our cable channels but our HD streams look beautiful, and we want viewers to see our content at its best.

As our audience’s viewing habits continue to evolve, we plan to add more Cablecast services to reach viewers the way they prefer. We’ll soon add Cablecast Screenweave, the cloud-based service and apps that let us effortlessly bring our live channels and VOD content to Apple TV and Roku devices.

Kayla Creamer is programming coordinator at BATV. She can be reached atkayla@batvinc.org.

For more information about Cablecast, call 866-866-4118 or visitwww.cablecast.tv.