Part of the Evertz Installation at Pacific Television Center
LOS ANGELES—For more than 30 years, Pacific Television Center (PacTV) has been a leading transmission and live production provider to the global broadcast industry. PacTV supports and provides services in fiber connectivity, satellite coordination, receive and records, multi-format tape play outs, live shots, satellite media tours and voiceovers. Our current fiber network is expansive, spanning from London to Los Angeles to Sydney, Australia, and on to Auckland, New Zealand, with additional connections in France and Canada.
A BETTER WAY OF DOING THINGS
Our previous fiber system spanned four cities with OC3 fibers. However, we quickly discovered the limitations of OC3 and opted to move to a higher capacity to provide megabits per second for the same amount of money. Of course, this move required the replace most of our existing system. We called on Evertz for the new gear, selecting their Advanced Optical Transport Platform (ATP) system, and this has enabled us to move to OC12, OC48, and even OC192 levels.
With the Evertz ATP system we were able to set up ingest points here, and at London and Sydney, allowing signals from other carriers to be received and cross-connected.
All of our facilities are built around the Evertz ATP system. We've installed Evertz ATP 16x16 switch fabric module routers, allowing signals to be switched, added, dropped or passed at any node in our network. The ATP system also includes Evertz ALB OC12/STM-4 trunk interface cards which perform last mile connections to all of our broadcasters. In addition, we depend upon Evertz cards for muxing and demuxing operations.
We're also using Evertz ALB OC48/STM-16 trunk interface modules for back hauls. The OC48 modules provide cost savings by reducing the per-megabit price, along with the ability to handle JPEG and its basically lossless compression.
SIGNAL PROCESSING TOO
In terms of signal conversion and processing, Evertz JPEG compression cards have certainly changed the way we do things. These encoder and decoder cards, along with the ATP system, have given us the ability to transport 100 Mbps ASI signals with JPEG information back and forth between our facilities. Also, JPEG2000 cards from Evertz can lower bit-rates without compromising quality. When we use Evertz ATP in combination with the JPEG2000 cards for transferring signals from country to country, the results are excellent, with pictures appearing just as clear and detailed as when they left our facility.
With the Evertz gear we can upgrade the system without shutting everything down. With other manufacturers' gear, some of the equipment would actually take down a complete node while it was being upgraded. However, with the Evertz ATP system we can perform an upgrade, bypass or switchover without losing the entire node.
The system has provided lots of flexibility and given us reliable and scalable media transport platform unlike any other.
Jakob Nielsen is the project coordinator at Pacific Television Center. He oversees the planning and deployment of new services, quality control and client assurance, and may be contacted at jakob@pactv.com.
For additional information, contact Evertz at 905-335-3701or visit www.evertz.com.
