Ascent Media has chosen the Harris CENTRIO broadcast multiviewer to form part of the fully HD-compatible infrastructure at a new media center to be built in the company’s central London facility.
The Media Center is at the heart of Ascent Media’s London operation. It is a one-stop source for encoding, content prep, transcoding, long-haul connectivity, MCR and transmission suites. The new center will integrate ingest, storage and archiving functions, making content more easily accessible to playout and repurpose for new media such as video on demand (VoD), mobile TV and IPTV. The center will also act as the London hub for signal switching, global connectivity and satellite downlink services. The media center is the most recent stage of continuing investment in Stephen Street following the successful launch of the European Transmission Center (ETC) in March 2007.
It is built around a Harris 512 x 512 Platinum router, and monitoring is driven off this using Harris’s CENTRIO combined router system. This enables any video signal to be monitored and alarmed and also makes it easy to make changes to the configuration.
The Media Center is already providing bespoke solutions for more than 100 clients and can tailor services to the needs of both ad hoc and contract clients — from arranging worldwide distributions for film premieres to live sports commentary insertion.
The Media Center features a dedicated encode and ingest area, which can ingest, quality control and encode material in multiple formats for playout; it also supports the 14 channels handled through Ascent Media’s ETC operations. This ingest area also links to Viia, Ascent Media’s new media storage and repurposing infrastructure.
For more information, visit www.harris.com.
