Voice of America (VOA), in Washington, D.C., has purchased a Slate 2100 switcher from Broadcast Pix. A second Slate 2100 is also in place at VOA’s London facility.
VOA is a multimedia international broadcasting service funded by the U.S. government through the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). VOA broadcasts more than 1500 hours of news, information, educational and cultural programming every week to an estimated worldwide audience of more than 115 million people.
The Slate 2100 switcher is being used to produce newsbreaks and remote inserts to enrich news of national, international and regional import for inclusion in VOA’s recently expanded Persian TV broadcasts. VOA’s round-the-clock operations already fully use staff, and production resources necessitated a supplemental studio. The Broadcast Pix Slate 2100 manned with a single operator fulfilled those specific operational needs efficiently.
According to Steve Hocker, senior broadcast Engineer at VOA, “The ability to broadcast a newscast complete with clips and have the same unit drive an audio board, clip store and lower-thirds, while being controlled by a single operator, was a very important operational benefit.”
The Broadcast Pix Slate 2100 system integrates a production switcher, production control panel, Inscriber CG, clip store and multiview monitoring, among other functions, in a single workstation-based system. The multifunction system and single-operator design of the Slate 2100 simplifies engineering and allows ease of installation and operation.
VOA plans to expand production of daily news inserts for Spanish language broadcasts to Latin America.
For more information, visit www.broadcastpix.com.
