CULVER CITY, Calif.—Olympusat, an independent broadcast media services company, has upgraded its playout system with the enhancement of 26 servers to the latest generation Version 19 Channel-in-a-Box Neo, TitleBoxNeo and SafeBox Neo from Playbox Neo, the company announced.

“We invested in PlayBox Neo Channel-in-a-Box two years ago with an installation at our engineering center in Culver City, Calif., and we are very pleased with it,” said Olympusat Operations Manager Michael Kohl.

“Van Duke and his colleagues at PlayBox Neo worked closely with us during the original install to integrate our existing ad sales management tools. Upgrading to Neo-19 software makes our workflow even more efficient. The PlayBox Neo team has added extra engineering features, including support for SCTE commands and N+M redundancy.”

The functions provided by Playbox Neo increase the flexibility and customization available to Olympusat, said Kohl. The media company controls the entire system from its West Palm Beach, Fla., facility.

With Playbox Neo, Olympusat processes “30 full high-definition channels in the way we have found most effective rather than the way some solutions would have imposed on us,” said Kohl.

“PlayBox Neo gives us the freedom to schedule programs, commercials and promos for fully automated playout. It also allows us to insert additional files or switch to fully live broadcasting on any selected channel at any time,” he added.

Olympusat CEO Tom Mohler expressed his satisfaction with the upgrades. “I want to thank both sides for their teamwork and professionalism as we continue to deliver high quality content to our network audiences.”

More information is available on the Playbox Neo website. 

NEVADA CITY, CALIF.—Spanish language programming provider Olympusat has put Telestream’s Vantage media processing platform at the center of its video production operations. Using the Vantage system, Olympusat claims that it has expanded its growth in channels and services.

To help manage range of channels, including its recently launched Vemox OTT platform, Olympusat installed the Vantage system with nine nodes of transcoding, three of which are GPU-accelerated Telestream Lightspeed servers and six are generic Intel machines. The Vantage workflow manager helps produce and manage all of Olympusat content, while the Vantage “run-on” rules direct tasks, which can benefit from GPU acceleration to the three Lightspeed servers and directs the other tasks to the generic Intel servers.

The Olympusat staff imports finished edits of programs from Adobe Premiere into the Vantage platform, but is planning on implementing the new Adobe Premiere Pro panel in Vantage version 7. This will allow for editors to track the progress of any encoding job on the Vantage server through the main Premiere Pro user interface.

Olympusat provides more than 100 channels through cable and satellite operators across the U.S.