WATC-TV On Point with Qligent System

MELBOURNE, FLA.—Serving the Atlanta community as a non-commercial Christian station, WATC-TV recently deployed the Qligent Point system to automatically monitor and record multiple broadcast signals from a single, centralized workstation. The system also allows WATC-TV to enable direct cloud integration for multi-point aggregation and analytics.

WATC-TV uses Point to monitor the ASI stream that leaves the facility, as well as the off-air RF signal that is broadcast by the transmitter. It also produces low bitrate video recordings of multiple co-located signals to document what WATC broadcasts on its primary and secondary channels. These recordings can be searched and viewed as proxies or thumbnails on one of the station’s PCs, or accessed remotely through a web browser. If a technical problem arises, the system immediately issues alerts and texts to notify station personnel.

The data gathered for the software-defined Point system comes from Qligent microprobes that are plugged into USB ports on the PC. The probes include a TV receiver to monitor off-air RF signals and an ASI receiver/decoder card for monitoring ASI signals leaving the plant.