John Garcia
VICTORIA, TEXAS
Eleven years ago, when I first came on board at KAVU-TV, I was tasked with the design of a new control room. Maintenance of the existing automation system infrastructure was becoming problematic and expensive. And back then, a new hard drive was going for some $2,500.
I immediately contacted one of my vendors and asked for his recommendations. He sang the praises for a box that did lower thirds, crawls, played back MPEG, switches and could connect to your router—the whole nine yards, and all contained in a single package.
Well, I was skeptical and remember thinking to myself that such a "box" sounded too good to be true. However, I went ahead and let the vendor set us up with a Rushworks demo system. Once it was in place, we took it for a three-week test drive.
LIVED UP TO ALL PROMISES
After the demonstration, I had to admit to being impressed with the features of the Rushworks Automation platform, but I was still a bit suspicious. We really couldn't believe the difference in price between it and other systems that we'd heard about—the cost was that much lower than the other systems we were looking at. It really amounted to half the price point for double the performance.
After receiving the demo though, we were sold. Without any hesitation, we decided to go ahead and purchase the Rushworks system.
I can now tell you truthfully that this was the best recommendation for gear that I have had during my 30 years in broadcasting.
Eleven years later, the group I'm with now has eight stations on the air, and they're all centralcasting from three 3-channel Rushworks Automation servers. Each of the stations has a variable amount of syndicated time to fill, so we also have nine Rushworks encoders. They ingest an average of 88 hours of material in every 24 hour period. A 2 TB NAS writes content automatically and it's shared among all our systems, allowing any of the eight channels to retrieve files. This reduces system redundancy, as files never have to be duplicated and then ingested into separate servers. It's really the perfect system.
GREAT SERVICE BEHIND THE SALE
With all that content, clearly system reliability is crucial to our operations, but with this system it's simply not an issue. Reliability has never been a challenge to the gear, to the application or the to technical support staff. When we have needed outside technical support, it has always been there on a 24/7 basis. I've been able to reach a real person at 3 a.m.; and also on weekends. I've never failed to get assistance when it was needed and in a timely manner.
What makes the Rushworks product so unique is that it's not too good to be true. The system really does everything it was claimed to do and also at a really good price. I wouldn't hesitate at all to recommend Rushworks automation.
John Garcia is operations manager for the Victoria Television Group. He may be contacted atjgarcia@kavutv.com
For more additional information, contact Rushworks at 888-894-7874 or visitwww.rushworks.tv.
