NVerzion Automation Improves Workflow Efficiencies for San Diego County Office of Education
SALT LAKE CITY — May 22, 2011 — NVerzion, a leading provider of cutting-edge tools for digital broadcasting and television station automation, today announced that the San Diego County Office of Education (SDCOE) has installed a comprehensive automation system powered by NVerzion technology, providing the educational leader with a scalable, file-based platform for managing both its educational and public access channels.
The new NVerzion automation system significantly increases efficiencies by managing long- and short-form program playback and satellite ingestion for SDCOE's two channels — San Diego Public Access Television and ITV, a 24/7 educational access channel. The ITV and San Diego Public Access channel are viewed by more than 850,000 and 350,000 households, respectively. ITV specializes in K-12 educational shows, European newscasts, and China's CCTV educational programming, while the San Diego Public Access channel airs programming created by local video producers.
The complete system includes NControlMC Master Control transmission playlists, NGest professional dubbing and recording software application, NTime event scheduling application, NPoint video preparation software for segmenting and trimming, Creative Protocol Interface Module (CPIM) for BXF traffic communications, and EMC-NT Ethernet machine control.
"Our robust new automation platform speeds up the workflow significantly by managing archived video content for on-air playback, all from a single, easy-to-use software-based solution," said Chris Brawner, senior director, media and communications services, San Diego County Office of Education. "The high performance and scalability of the combined NVerzion automation platform and our video server technologies provides us with a powerful, future-proof solution for archiving and playing television content."
Program logs are generated via a Myers Information Systems ProTrack metadata management system and then sent to the NVerzion automation system, which seamlessly controls a wide range of equipment, including Harmonic® Spectrum™ MediaDeck and MediaCenter video servers. This enables the SDCOE to cost-effectively store all reusable content in Harmonic's Omneon MediaGrid™ shared storage system for automatic playback. The result is a dramatic reduction of staff time dedicated to reingesting content, thus lowering capital and operational expenses for the nonprofit educational institution.
"We're proud to work with NVerzion and the San Diego County Office of Education on this important project," said Mark Cousins, senior product line manager for media servers at Harmonic. "Our series of Spectrum video servers are designed to be open, scalable, and reliable, so that an educational broadcaster like the San Diego County Office of Education can scale its bandwidth and storage cost-effectively to deliver television content that fosters learning in communities."
Currently, the end-to-end automation system is configured to support programming for up to three television channels and features a scalable design, so that the SDCOE can easily operate additional channels in the future.
"This installation is an excellent example of how we customize the design of each automation system with the end users' specific needs in mind," said Reed Haslam, director of sales and marketing, NVerzion. "The San Diego County Office of Education needed a sophisticated fault-tolerant control system that would reliably manage the main, backup, and archive devices to ensure protection of valuable broadcast material. NVerzion designed that exact system, while keeping costs in mind. As their needs grow, the broadcaster will benefit even further from this scalable, long-term solution."
