AUSTRALIA’S PREMIER MEDIA GROUP ADDS NEW CHANNELS

One of Australia’s leading content providers for subscription television, Premier Media Group (PMG) has seamlessly expanded its operations through the use of equipment and services supplied by Quinto Communications.

From its headquarters in Pyrmont, Sydney, PMG owns and operates TV channels, which are provided to subscription TV providers FOXTEL, Austar and Optus.

On November 1 the new motorsportoriented SPEED channel was launched through FOXTEL.

“We were looking for systems that we could use with our existing infrastructure and wanted to maintain a consistency in our approach”, said David Blackett, PMG Engineering Manager.

PMG’s existing Evertz QMC master control switcher platform and preexisting content management and playout systems signifi cantly eased the rollout. Rather than a major technical undertaking, the expansion became an incremental evolution and broadening of capacity that involved increases in the capacity to handle incoming live feeds, and in master control switching, branding and signal monitoring capacity.

The most visible part of the added channel capacity is in the presentation area where PMG required and constructed additional presentation suites. “When we are dealing with live programming we want to be able to spread out with separate control rooms for live channels - because of the vagaries of live sport we prefer to have one person per channel,” explained Blackett. “Of course there is an SD and HD version of each channel. Effectively each operator is looking after four channels when replaying pre-recorded material or two channels when dealing with live events.

“When it’s not live and we are playing out recorded material we wanted to fold back down to just use the main presentation rooms. So we needed a system with the fl exibility to scale up and down as needed with the same look, feel and quality for the presentation team so we don’t have to retrain people after their initial training. We also wanted to keep the cost of change low but maintain features and fl exibility at a very high level so that each channel has the same high level of reliability and performance. To do that easily we had to have common equipment.”

After discussions with Quinto Communications, the Australian distributor of Evertz, PMG selected additional Evertz QMC Master Control switchers and Evertz QMCDCP Desktop Control Panel software with touch screen control surfaces to power the new SD and HD services.

PMG’s pre-existing Evertz MVP Multi-Image Display Processor systems, which provide video monitoring for both the Master Control Room and the presentation suites were also expanded. The presentation suites’ MVP Multiview display processor was expanded to drive a total of 12 high resolution multi-image displays with each display providing all the monitoring required for a channel, or in some cases for a pair of channels, on a single large fl at panel display. Sources for any channel can be called up and displayed in any suite. Quinto also supplied new NEC Multeos large fl at panel displays for monitoring in the additional newly constructed presentation control rooms.

The SPEED Channel also presented a design and integration challenge with additional equipment required to handle the unique “HotPass” feature of the US-based NASCAR racing broadcast. Viewers can select to see the race from the vantage point of each of four drivers, as an alternative to the general broadcast coverage, by using the red button on FOXTEL’s remote. Viewers can also listen to either the broadcast network audio or the selected driver’s team radio. The valueadded NASCAR HotPass feature for FOXTEL subscribers requires PMG to automatically switch each of the driver views back to the main international race feed during times when the individual driver views may be unavailable, such as during US ad breaks. Evertz X-0401 video switchers have been purchased and utilised to facilitate this seamless video and audio switching between individual driver views and the general broadcast coverage.

Snell Group Mach HD motion compensated HD standards converters were also supplied by Quinto as part of the new build, to supplement the 5 pre-existing Snell Alchemist PhC HD standards converters that Quinto has previously supplied to PMG. The Alchemist and Mach HD converters are used in order to transparently convert 59.94 fi elds per second HD feeds coming in from the US to Australian 50 fi elds per second broadcast standards, maintaining the highest possible video quality on challenging, fast moving, high defi nition sports content.

“We already had the Evertz routers as the core of our pre-existing Evertz QMC master control switching and branding systems for our existing channels and it was relatively easy to add the additional Evertz QMC driven SD and HD SPEED channels” said Blackett.

PMG runs fully redundant A and B hot systems for all its channels. Each channel is output simultaneously by both an A and a B system and presentation can use Evertz modular changeover switching equipment to seamlessly switch broadcast of any channel to be from either of these two systems. The new channel simply required the installation of extra inputs on the core routers and extra master control switchers for the new SD and HD channels.

“By using Evertz systems PMG is proactively ready to build its business by being able to quickly add new channels for clients,” said Alan McIlwaine, Managing Director of Quinto Communications. “PMG is able to leverage its existing systems using very scalable core architecture so any new channels can be easily added. We are pleased to be able to supply an Evertz solution with the ability to expand quickly rather than starting from scratch each time.”