Crawford Launches HD Channels With OmniBus Colossus

Crawford Communications of Atlanta has expanded its OmniBus Systems’ Colossus play-out capability to provide HD transmission services.

Crawford Communications’ Colossus HD installation provides fully redundant primary and backup channels with file transfer to and from video servers and archive storage. These transfers are managed by OmniBus Cache Manager and Workflow Manager software. The Colossus system also provides traffic interfaces to the multiple client scheduling systems used at Crawford.

Crawford has been using Colossus since 2005, according to Donald Rodd, vice president of engineering and technical operations for Crawford’s satellite division. Colossus is a full-featured automated transmission product that incorporates schedule management, event building and transitions, timeline monitoring, live-event management and cache management.

“As a multi-use channel platform, it runs 26 of our redundant networks very efficiently,” Rodd said. “When we needed to enhance the existing system to provide HD capacity, the scalable Colossus architecture made it easy; the expansion went flawlessly and was completed in just a single day.”