Prominent Spanish regional TV service provider Canal Sur has begun broadcasting its HD channel under the control of a newly-installed Marina automation system from Pebble Beach Systems. Described as a ‘step change’ in automation, Marina is designed to cater for all channel types.
Based in Seville, Canal Sur will be adding further channels to Marina automation control over the coming weeks and months. The Marina automation system sits at the heart of an installation which incorporates mxfSPEEDRAIL S1111 encoders from MOG Technologies, rather than employing traditional video servers for ingest. Marina also ingests from Canal Sur’s FTP site, automatically detecting new content and starting the transfer automatically as soon as the files are available.
The installation features Tedial asset management, Grass Valley K2 servers and routers, Miranda DVE and mixing, Starfish subtitling and Orad graphics. Marina is supplied with six clients, four of which are dedicated to playout and ingest operations, with the remaining two used for segment mark, clip and trim functions. It controls a total of 15 channels: four main channels featuring A/B playout, full mixer and graphics; three simpler channels; a spare channel and seven regional channels.
Canal Sur’s technical manager, José Enrique Zamorano, commented: “The teams from Pebble Beach Systems and their Spanish partner, Promovisa, have provided exceptional service, especially during the past few weeks as we built up to transferring control of our HD channel to the next generation Marina automation system at the end of July. Canal Sur HD features a mix of programming, including movies and sport, and we’re delighted that Marina is enabling us to broadcast the Champions League playoffs to our audience for the first time in HD this month.
“In addition to meeting our technical requirements, Pebble Beach Systems were the only vendor who offered full language localisation, and Marina’s Spanish language GUI has made commissioning and training very straightforward, much to the appreciation of our operators.”
