KESQ-TV, the ABC affiliate in Palm Springs, Calif., has installed Digital Broadcast’s MediaFire IP Automated Master Control System. The station is licensed to Gulf-California Broadcast Company, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the News-Press & Gazette Company (NPG), and the installation marks the initial roll-out of similar systems at other NPG properties.
The new playout system provides multichannel MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 media splicing for direct feeds to a transmitter or cable systems, thus streamlining a MPEG origination network, as no baseband switching or keying is needed.
“We really like the reduced infrastructure required by this system,” notes Jim DeChant, NPG’s director of technical operations. “It is format agnostic and flexible, making it simple to add mobile channels.”
The system also includes an Automated Scheduled Record (ASR) feature that allows feeds to be selected via time-of-day scheduling, thus allowing users to capture selected program material from a multiprogram transport stream.
