CTV Expands Use of Harris Digital News and Storage Products

Bell Media's CTV broadcast stations in Canada are adding digital news solutions from Harris Corporation at two stations and upgrading the Harris NewsForce product at other stations. The moves are part of an effort to simplify network-wide news operations and better share content that will establish the Harris NewsForce solution as a common production platform across most of CTV's television properties.

Jim Morrison, senior director of engineering projects for CTV and TSN, said in a statement that the ongoing Harris NewsForce installations will streamline operations and support and that the open architecture of the Harris NewsForce solutions has simplified the integration of news production operations with CTV's network-wide asset management system.

CTV's Victoria and Ottawa stations will install the NewsForce system for the first time while the broadcaster will also upgrade existing NewsForce solutions at its Montreal and Halifax locations so that all four sites have the latest-generation of Harris' NEXIO AMP server and Velocity editing solutions.

"Harris has been very open and has put a lot of support into helping us integrate our solutions," said Morrison in a statement. "We have had an in-house media asset management solution for many years that Harris integrated into, easing that file-based movement between the news systems and our home-grown solution. Any operator anywhere in the country can search any other operator's news content.  The common platform across our stations makes it easier to collaborate and share content."

At the same time, CTV also announced that it was upgrading its media storage capabilities at the English-language sports network TSN with Harris' NEXIO Farad online storage solutions. The upgrades will allow the channel to handle more content and streamline workflows.

NEXIO Farad also integrates closely with Velocity editing systems for live sports production, which speeds up file transfers in live production.

"NEXIO Farad gives us more on-air stability in a high-volume environment, which was important as TSN is one of our principle revenue-generating channels," said Morrison in a statement.  "We're handling potentially hundreds of thousands of files in the sports environment, and Farad's hardware architecture offers considerable protection. That stability, along with higher storage density and volume capacity, better prepares us for future growth and major events like the Summer Games."