WDBJ-TV Taps Thomson Grass Valley for Digital Conversion

WDBJ-TV, the CBS affiliate in Roanoke, Va., has converted its entire digital news production operations to a Grass Valley shared-storage system from Thomson for its daily newscasts.

The commitment includes multiple K2 Media Server and Client Systems, Aurora ingest, browse, edit, and play-out workstations, and NetCentral monitoring software. The various workstations located throughout the WDBJ newsroom are linked to a Grass Valley Open Storage Area Network environment based around the Grass Valley K2 Media Server.

“The new Aurora Suite is ideally suited to station News departments like ours at WDBJ, which require unlimited access to metadata and the sharing of material and extremely fast project turnaround times,” said Carl Guffey, director of operations and engineering for WDBJ. “We chose Grass Valley because of the way the systems work together seamlessly and the superior customer support we know we can count on.”

The station purchased the system from Digital Video Group Inc., the local Grass Valley dealer with whom they worked on the system design and layout. Digital Video Group will also be involved in the systems implementation, to be completed within the next few months.