Red Bee Media has updated its playout centres in London and Salford with the PRISMON Multiviewer system from Rohde & Schwarz.
The new system enables the company to move on from its SDI-based workflows to IP.
Red Bee selected the SDM (Scalable Distributed Multiviewer) and the MCC (Multiviewer Control Centre) options.
SDM enables any input to any output, and allows PRISMON to share resources across a network. MCC provides a single point of control for a network of multiviewers, which Rohde & Schwarz says gives instant reconfiguration of multiple displays, either in response to the user interface or on command from a system-level automation system.
“Multiviewers are mission critical to our playout centres,” said Robert Luggar, head of broadcast media solutions and platforms at Red Bee. “We need to monitor around 450 streams, so we need scale and flexibility. Today those streams are SDI, but Rohde & Schwarz demonstrated that the PRISMON configuration could handle that, but more important could easily be switched to IP in the future.”
Andreas Loges, vice president media technologies at Rohde & Schwarz, added: “We competed fiercely for this contract against a number of other vendors. We won because we could deliver a drop-in solution, a direct replacement for the life-expired multiviewer, and because our software-defined approach is inherently a hybrid platform, supporting SDI and IP signals, in both SMPTE ST 2022-6 and ST 2110.
“Broadcasters around the world are facing the same challenge. Existing multiviewers are reaching the ends of their lives and were built solely around SDI. Because of this hybrid capability, and the power of SDM, PRISMON is well positioned for many more large-scale playout centres.”
