SAN FRANCISCO—Independent station owner Griffin Communications is putting the finishing touches on a new, all HD broadcast facility in Tulsa, Okla. the home of News On 6 (KOTV, the local CBS affiliate) and The Tulsa CW (KQCW, the local CW affiliate).
The facility will be equipped with several HD cameras, a new HD video production switcher and several HD media servers from Grass Valley. The multiformat production equipment will help News On 6 streamline its operations through file-based recording of incoming feeds, clip management and playout of a variety of network-supplied and locally-produced programming.
The new broadcast facility is set to be fully operational in January 2013. News On 6 and Tulsa CW, plus two digital subchannels (News on 6 Now and ThisTV) will be produced in the new studios. Master Control and the new Grass Valley servers will begin operations in the new building in December 2012.
“Grass Valley has always offered a dependable product that we have come to rely on, and we use it to its fullest extent,” said Gerald Weaver, News On 6 chief engineer. “The Kayenne switcher in particular, in our opinion, is the finest on the market today and is clearly the best product for our purposes, which is to produce a wide variety of program types, including the 39.5 hours of local news we produce each week.”
News On 6 has used Grass Valley production switchers for many years, beginning with a Grass Valley 300 and recently moving on to a Kalypso. For the new facility, the station has added a Grass Valley Kayenne Video Production Center switcher, which will handle the signals from four Grass Valley LDK 4000 Elite HD cameras, currently in use.
The station has also added two next-generation K2 Summit 3G server frames and several terabytes of storage capacity to its Grass Valley K2 Summit servers. The new 3G servers will be used in tandem with a Harris automation system to handle incoming and outgoing programming and news feeds as digital files.
“The best thing I can say about Grass Valley’s servers is that we never have to think about them, that’s how reliable they are,” Weaver said. “We set them up and they work exactly as planned.”
