Televisora Nacional S.A. (TVN) has built a new TV facility in Panama City and installed a full complement of Grass Valley production and distribution equipment to support the studio’s routing and master control operations for its established TVN channel and new TVMax channel.
Targeted to the male audience, TVMax was created to absorb all the sports programming from the existing TVN channel. As a result, a new sports news program was created for TVMax, and the channel now also airs drama series, sitcoms and reality shows.
The installation was completed last May and is now fully on-air. The studio is complete with a Grass Valley Kayak HD video production switcher, Apex audio routers, Trinix video routers, a Maestro master control and channel branding system, numerous K2 Summit media servers, GeckoFlex signal processing modules, and a Sonata MADI audio converter.
The K2 Summit servers are being used to play back content in multiple resolutions and compression formats. It can automatically convert between HD and SD formats (up/down/cross) and various aspect ratios and manage the multitude of file types the network deals with on a daily basis, including DV 25, DV 50 and AVC-Intra.
Televisora Nacional is a long-time customer, having purchased Grass Valley cameras, servers, routers and other equipment for the network’s TVN channel, the predecessor to TVMax. Besides the new equipment, Grass Valley also provided a range of services for the new project that included system installation, training and maintenance.
