John TerrillOGDEN, UTAH—As the market-leading Spanish-language television station in Utah, NBC Telemundo affiliate KULX-TV brings a wide range of high-quality programming to the Latino population in and around Salt Lake City. In addition to NBC Telemundo programming, we produce a variety of content including local news, weather and sports, church services, local public service programs and special event coverage. We’ve been on the air for 20 years and we now reach approximately 450,000 viewers.
That growth sparked our transition from analog to digital and from SD to HD. Our digital transition was smooth and greatly improved our picture quality.
SPEEDY RESOLUTION TO A CRISIS
Over the years, we have used several automation systems in both analog and digital with good results. However, this all changed when the three-year system that was part of our HD automation project crashed, probably due to Internet hacking. Overnight, we had to find a new system to keep us on-air. NVerzion and their NCloud system came to our immediate rescue. They’re based in Salt Lake City, and showed up after we called, working all day and into the night to get us back on the air. It wasn’t long before we had our new system up and running. NVerzion’s customer service and technical support truly shined during this stressful time.
One our main reason for choosing NVerzion automation was due to the reliability that the company’s Class product offered. It features modular architecture and contains no single point of failure. We can bypass any piece of equipment that isn’t functioning properly and still get the signal on-air to ensure a smooth television experience for our viewers.
The system also provides control of a variety of third-party equipment, including servers, master control and routing switchers, and graphics and traffic systems.
NVerzion automation has also accelerated our file-based workflow and a component that we’ve find especially innovative and useful is the CloudNine box networkbased video/audio server and storage. This provides us with all the functionality found in a traditional video server along with the features not usually found in a standard channel-in-a-box system. With CloudNine we can simultaneously record and play out audio and video content from a wide range of third-party commercial and program delivery systems, as well as update metadata. This dramatically speeds up our operational efficiencies. The flexible solution supports a wide range of popular encoding formats, including MPEG-2/4 and AVI, along with a number of video resolutions and standards. We can control CloudNine locally or remotely via an intuitive interface, which also helps to speed things up.
PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE
Right now, the NVerzion NCloud system controls our main NBC Telemundo HD channel and we’re planning to extend control to other programming streams we transmit to further increase operational efficiencies. As NCloud is highly scalable, we can easily add channels without adding more workstations, which saves a lot of money.
Delivering a high-quality presentation to our viewers is important, and NVerzion automation helps us get that job done in the most efficient way possible.
John Terrill is the founder and president of KULX-TV. He may be contacted atj.terrill@att.net.
For additional information, contact NVerzion at 801-293-8420 or visitwww.nverzion.com.
