NEVADA CITY, CALIF. — The Young Broadcasting station group has upgraded the news departments of eight of its stations to a fully networked, file-based, high-definition news production and distribution system from Grass Valley.
The newly purchased equipment, which is now being installed, will be on-air by the end of the year in most markets and follows a successful implementation of Grass Valley HD digital news production technology at Young’s KWCQ, in Davenport, Iowa. That system has been on the air since October 2010.
Systems at each station include 25 seats of Grass Valley Edius 6 multiformat editing workstations, two K2 Summit production clients, as well as Aurora Playout software modules and client computers for automated playout.
The eight new Young stations standardizing on Grass Valley technology include: WKRN, in Nashville, Tenn.; WATE, in Knoxville, Tenn.; WRIC, in Richmond, Va.; WLNS, in Lansing, Mich.; WTEN, in Albany, N.Y.; KELO, in Sioux Falls, S.D.; WBAY, in Green Bay, WI.; and KLFY, in Lafayette, La.
“We’ve had a great experience with Grass Valley technology in our news department at KWCQ, and the staff there has really become much more productive in preparing its daily newscasts,‖ said Craig Porter, director of operations for Young Broadcasting. “By standardizing on Grass Valley, we were able to enjoy significant cost and implementation time savings. There are not too many companies that can handle such a large multi-station implementation, but Grass Valley has helped get us up to speed very quickly and we feel confident we now have a cost-effective news production platform we can grow with into the future."
The Young stations involved will use the EDIUS editors to cut daily news packages while the Aurora Playout software, in tandem with the K2 Summit servers, will enable the stations’ staff to automatically schedule their newscast rundowns while still retaining the ability to insert breaking news segments, or go live from the scene, at the last minute.
