Scripps Taps Volicon for TS Monitoring


BURLINGTON, MASS.: Scripps Media is standardizing on Volicon’s Observer TS (transport stream) digital video monitoring and logging system for all of its 13 stations. Each Scripps Media station will use an Observer system for CALM Act compliance, ad verification, quality of experience (QoE), NAVE monitoring, and ratings analysis. E.W. Scripps headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio, will leverage the Volicon systems for centralized monitoring, giving company executives the ability to monitor news, programming, graphics, and general performance of all stations from multiple large-screen displays.

"After looking at all the major players in the digital video monitoring field, we found that the Volicon Observer TS best met the requirements of our station engineers," said Mike Doback, Vice President of Engineering at Scripps Media. "In addition to supporting quality control, legal compliance, and executive oversight of all our stations, the Volicon system gives us the opportunity to address all of these tasks from within a single solution."

Observer TS enables networks and broadcasters to increase logging density, accommodate high-resolution content repurposing, directly monitor native MPEG ASI/IP handoffs, and inspect and export transport streams—all while operating efficiently over a LAN or WAN. By using Observer TS for compliance logging and air checks, operators can easily extract flexible MPEG metadata and troubleshoot the MPEG transport stream live or from the Observer log.

With two configurable logs—either the high-bit rate native ASI content or the low-bit rate proxy for remote viewing—logging and monitoring with the Observer TS supports an extremely network-efficient workflow. The system also makes complete stream, search, analyze, clip, and publish functionality available from within the versatile Web-based Observer user interface.