BRIEFS

WNIT Elkhart, Ind., a PBS station, has added the Sundance Digital FastBreak automation system to automate multicasting. WNIT Chief Engineer Brian Hoover says he consulted with other PBS stations that were using the system before making the purchase. “This was our first experience with automation, and we needed a user-friendly system with an easy learning curve,” he says. The system will drive a SeaChange Broadcast MediaCluster server and master-control gear. Two channels will be controlled initially, but it can handle up to six channels.

Content providers that send video out to 2G, 2.5G and 3G cellphones now have a new means of checking the quality of outgoing video and audio: the Tektronix K15 version 2.1 analyzer. It displays all video-telephony calls in a live mobile network; customers can calculate key performance indicators and extract the voice/video stream of each video call. The data can be loaded into a Tektronix MTS4EA elementary video-stream-analysis tool for complete analysis.

TNT's coverage of NBA All-Star weekend from Denver Feb. 18-20 will use 35 HD cameras, the largest number the network has ever used for an NBA game. New HD features include aerial shots from a helicopter camera, indoor use of the Cablecam (which has become ubiquitous on NFL telecasts) and Magic Cam. Cablecam is a high-tech camera that allows TNT to pull frames of live game action, logos and players and transform them into three-dimensional graphics to be projected on various downtown Denver landmarks.

Arroyo Video Solutions now supports native 10 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces to give cable operators more flexibility when responding to customer demand for VOD. Arroyo co-founder and CTO Paul Sherer says that, by integrating 10GigE boards built by other vendors into its platform, Arroyo can easily and rapidly respond to operators' needs for speed, performance and scalability. The technology offers tenfold scaling in capacity versus 1 Gigabit Ethernet. As a result, Arroyo says, a single fiber can carry up to 2,500 3.75-Mbps video streams and significantly reduce the number of network paths that operators have to manage.