NASSAU, BAHAMAS—ILTV is a cable television channel operated by Island Luck, a Bahamas lottery retailer and gaming lounge operator. Our programming is anchored by Quick Draw, a “three-ball” drawing game, shown live every half hour. Between live draws, we feature music videos, promotional announcements and original programming.
We launched ILTV using an aging automation system and found its scheduling capabilities very inflexible and difficult to use. Operation was automated and scheduled, but the scheduling tools and the process itself was cumbersome, not intuitive and time-consuming.
We needed an automation system that supported an efficient and versatile scheduling interface; a solution that would tightly integrate with a traffic system for ad sales; work with a radio automation platform for our planned radio offering; and had the scalability to add more if we expand.
The MOM platform features a built-in scheduler that allows users to drag-and-drop clips.FINDING THE SYSTEM
We visited all of the popular vendors at the 2016 NAB Show; many were more complicated or costly than we wanted. Few came close to the features and integration we needed. We visited the ENCO booth near the end of our search and its new MOM (Media Operations Manager) solution caught our eye. We were quickly impressed by its graphical interface, simplicity of operation, and rich feature set.
We purchased ENCO MOM as a turnkey system. Migrating our existing content assets into the MOM library was remarkably straightforward—existing files were graphically dragged and dropped into the library from our centralized storage, and MOM was instantly able to play them to air. We fully transitioned after running MOM in parallel with our old system for just one day.
NUTS AND BOLTS
All playback of pre-recorded content is done by the MOM system, pulling files from our shared storage. MOM switches easily between pre-recorded content and our live draws at the top and bottom of each hour, with direct control of our AJA Kumo router and NewTek TriCaster Mini production system.
ENCO MOM’s built-in scheduler offers a much friendlier interface than our previous system; letting us simply drag-and-drop clips from the library to the schedule and align them to our clock. It’s now fast and easy for us to create a schedule, get it on air, graphically rearrange the schedule, adding or deleting entries on the fly. MOM also integrates tightly with the traffic and billing system we received as part of the solution.
The multi-codec flexibility of MOM has been an added benefit. We use a mix of production formats, but with our old system, we were forced to transcode everything into one format to get it on air. With MOM, we simply drag our content into the system regardless of its format, and it’s immediately playable; no file or format conversions are required.
We are now in the process of acquiring an FM radio broadcast license, and we have purchased a Visual Radio package from ENCO—including the company’s DAD radio automation software—to run the radio station and provide an audio/video stream on the internet. The common platforms and designs of ENCO automation systems will ensure that the two stations can share resources. We also plan to feed the Visual Radio programming to MOM as additional content for our cable channel between live draws. We are very happy with MOM and are excited about our future plans.
Karlyle Harris is a digital media specialist at ILTV Studios. He can be reached atkharris@ilstudios.com.
For more information, please visitwww.enco.comor call 248-827-4440.
