Ascent Media EMEA is standardising on the Volicon Observer Enterprise for compliance logging of 35 channels originated from the company’s European transmission centre.
Ascent Media EMEA plays out 35 channels to mainland Europe, and the company is migrating all of those channels onto Observer systems installed in its central London facility.
“Underlying every technology investment we make is a commitment to reliability,” said Steve Samwell, director of technology at Ascent Media EMEA. “We’ve worked with a number of compliance logging systems, and only Volicon’s Observer has come through with the stability we require. The Observer is a cost-effective and compact solution that was deployed quickly in a tight space and has subsequently provided our staff and our customers with an excellent front end and intuitive user interface.”
Ascent Media EMEA has deployed four quad-channel Observer Enterprise units so far for a total of 16 channels. Among the reasons the company chose the Volicon product is its ability to support all of these channels with a single server, which in turn reduces space, power, and cooling requirements. The output of each channel is logged for 90 days for compliance purposes. Always running in the background, the Observer system makes it easy for Ascent Media EMEA engineering staff to quickly go back in time and find faults such as audio, graphics, or subtitle problems.
“Compliance logging isn’t the most exciting aspect of our operations, but in this area we don’t want exciting; we want reliable,” added Samwell. “Quite honestly, the Observer works, it has a good interface, and it is scalable. These factors and the system’s stability sold us on the Observer and gave us the confidence to standardize on it.”
