Trilogy’s Mercury Links New Pacific Television London Facility

ANDOVER, UNITED KINGDOM, SEPTEMBER 9, 2015 –Pacific Television Center (PacTV), a Los Angeles-based independent global transmission and production company, recently announced the completion of its new London facility, located in London’s famed Silicon Roundabout.

PacTV London’s new home is double the size of its previous site and includes two state-of-the-art HD studios, a 20-rack colocation centre, and a wide range of high-end cameras, monitors and routers with IP-based connectivity.

As a global operation, low latency communication between locations is vital to deliver the high-quality broadcast services PacTV provides. The move to the new London location prompted a review of current communications technologies. PacTV decided to expand its use of Trilogy’s Mercury Interface Units (MIUs), a multi-purpose device that provides multichannel real-time voice communications, radio interoperability, conventional and VoIP telephony. 

Trilogy’s Mercury VoIP intercom technology delivers ultra-low latency intercom, reporting and control communication links between the new London studios, PacTV’s Los Angeles headquarters, and the PacTV facilities in New York, Washington, D.C. and Singapore. The technology enables each location to quickly and freely communicate over an IP backbone network with low latency and enables PacTV to efficiently use all of its global resources to support customer demand.

“We’ve worked with Trilogy since we first installed their Mercury system in LA several years ago,” said Jakob Nielsen, Deployment Engineer for PacTV. “Before installing Trilogy’s MIUs, we were still using landlines to communicate between internal and external sites. After the installation, we rapidly forgot that phones existed, and soon began rolling out Mercury to multiple locations, which now includes the new London facility.”

The Mercury system is comprised of Mercury Interface Units, PCI Cards or USB devices connected over a standard IP network. The devices, known as Mercury hosts, have varying capacities to suit differing operational requirements.

The MIUs used by PacTV provide the highest capacity of the available hosts. Each one acts as a versatile audio processing unit and IP gateway that enables a wide range of external devices to be connected. When connected to multiple hardware or virtual control panels, the MIU can be used as a stand-alone intercom system. This type of arrangement is ideal for studio facilities, OB vehicles and SNG trucks. As requirements increase, up to 32 additional virtual control panels can be added to a single unit. If required, multiple units can be interconnected to create much larger configurations.

“PacTV provides first-rate production and transmission services for its clients and insists on very high-quality, high bandwidth audio to support them,” says Ewan Johnston, Trilogy Sales Director. “Their investment in Mercury for the new London facility demonstrates their commitment to outstanding audio, which makes our ongoing association with PacTV an ideal partnership.”

Mercury and other new Trilogy products and services, including the new VoiceFlow™ communication unit and Gemini II distributed matrix intercom system, can be seen at IBC 2015 in Amsterdam from 11-15 September in Hall 10. Stand A29.

About Trilogy Communications

Trilogy has supplied audio communications equipment to customers in more than seventy countries since 1986. The company was originally formed to design and build video and audio infrastructure equipment for the television and radio broadcast market. It continues to serve this market but now also offers its products to a wide array of customers in defence, emergency management and training and simulation, oil and gas, gaming, and other industries.

Trilogy counts some of the world's best known names among its customer base. These include BBC, ITV, CBS, ABC, Fox TV, France Television, Arqiva, Star TV, Times TV, Qatar TV, Al Jazeera Sports and many others.

For more information, please visit: www.trilogycomms.com

About Pacific Television

For more than 30 years, Los Angeles-based Pacific Television Center has been a leading transmission and live production provider to the global broadcast industry offering its clients around-the-clock support and services in fiber connectivity, satellite coordination, receive and records, multi-format tape play outs, live shots, satellite media tours and voiceovers. On a local level, its broadcast facility in Los Angeles connects to the ATT/PacBell Hollywood Hub and The Switch Los Angeles; in New York, it connects to Ascent Media Waterfront, The Switch New York and Azzurro; and in London, its facility has multiple circuits to and from BT Tower. Additional services include the PacTV Pools in Los Angeles and New York, remote location production via Western Pacific Mobile Microwave in Los Angeles, and a fiber network to several countries including the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and France. The company’s solid reputation has led to successful relationships with major networks including ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, ESPN, CNN, BSkyB and BBC in the UK, Network TEN in Australia and Sky in New Zealand as well as top carriers including Level 3/Vyvx, SingTel, Intelsat, SES World Skies, BT, Nexion and XO Communications.

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