Quicklink equipment has featured highly at a number of high-profile events, most recently the London Olympics and Torch Relay.
When the Olympic flame was traveling around the UK and coming up to Scotland and traveling down the western isles, a Scottish TV (STV) cameraman was there to film the event. STV was able to transmit the Olympic torch footage through Quicklink Store and Forward, compress it, and send the small files back to base through the Inmarsat BGAN making the transfer faster and more cost effective, resulting in no loss of quality. Bill Shand, technical resources supervisor of STV, said they had used an aircraft in the past to film such an event, but the whole process would have taken five to six hours. With Quicklink, STV had broadcast-quality materials back in the studio within an hour.
Shand said STV uses Store and Forward on a daily basis. It has nine to 10 clients in operation based around the more remote geographical areas of Scotland. It tends to use Quicklink Store and Forward in places like Shetland, on the outer reaches of the Scottish mainland where STV doesn’t tend to base a cameraman there all the time. The network uses stringers with Quicklink encoders and then they just code it up there and then.
The Quicklink Store and Forward LNG solution is a simple to use Mac- or Windows-based system that has been optimized to be used both in the bureau and on location. The video is filmed on camera, edited and transferred to the receiving studio using Quicklink’s Store and Forward software. The Store and Forward software compresses and transmits the data reducing the file size by 93 percent for a broadcast-quality transmission. This reduction in file size reduces operating costs and ensures that the file is received in the fastest possible time.
The added benefits of the system are that incomplete transmitted files can be played to air and even broadcast-quality footage can appear as live to air while the recorded file is being received at the studio.
With Quicklink’s partnership with File Catalyst , the additional options of HTTP , UDP and up to seven parallel FTP all serve to offer a complete file transfer system for broadcasters.
