ITN Productions has opened a new low-latency IP control room.
Delivering daily news coverage across two newsrooms, the new production control room (PCR) combines Techex system design with Matrox Video and TAG Video Systems solutions to provide software-defined monitoring and multiviewing for live bulletins.
Unifying probing, monitoring, visualisation and analysis under a single platform, TAG Realtime Media aims to provide ITN with efficient load balancing, rapid mosaic generation and on-the-fly transcoding. Supporting SMPTE ST 2110 and JPEG XS, the solution enables scalable monitoring to meet the needs of live news production.
Commenting, John Treadwell, senior strategic account manager, global accounts at Techex said, “As long-time partners with TAG Video Systems, we were able to bring our experience to bear while designing this system using the TAG–Matrox Video integration. We worked closely with ITN to capture requirements, validate the design, and deliver the project. That collaboration will continue as we support ITN in evolving the system now that it’s live.”
The PCR’s 10 4K multiviewer displays are driven by Matrox ConvertIP ST 2110—HDMI interfaces with latency between 1 and 1.5 frames. IP signals are translated into native HDMI outputs with deterministic timing and no perceptible lag, maintaining consistent, frame-accurate synchronisation across all displays.
Daniel Maloney, technical marketing manager at Matrox Video, added, “The Matrox ConvertIP family was designed exactly for projects like this. Seeing ITN achieve such low-latency multiviewer performance across multiple 4K displays is a great demonstration of how tight partnerships can bring immediacy and confidence back into IP-based control rooms.”
TAG’s Operator Console allows multiviewer screens to be quickly adapted to the current production, enhancing control in the gallery. TAG’s chief architect, Paul Briscoe, said, “In a newsroom environment, the immediacy of information delivery, while retaining the flexibility of a software-defined system, is hugely validating. It demonstrates that an advanced, all-IP control room can meet the real-time demands that live production requires. Techex’s approach brought together the strengths of
TAG and Matrox Video in a way that allowed ITN to focus purely on production rather than infrastructure.”
