Virginia’s PEG TV Adopts Osprey Video’s Talon Encoders and Decoders for Point-to-Point HD Transport in Remote Productions

DALLASJune 7, 2018 — Osprey Video today announced that PEG TV, an international award-winning cable TV station providing television services to Hampton City Schools and the community of Hampton, Virginia, is using Talon G1 encoders and decoders as the heart of its remote-production operation. Rather than go to the expense of upgrading or replacing its aging SD production truck, PEG TV deployed the Talon units to handle point-to-point HD transport from multiple locations.

“The Talon G1 encoders and decoders are our microwave truck in a box. We’ve saved time and money by not having to get an expensive, over-the-air system that would involve a vehicle,” said Andrew Foley, director of PEG TV. “Except for large productions like sporting events or graduations, the Talons have all but replaced our microwave truck. In fact, they have become a multipurpose tool we use to handle any transport scenario that might come up. The Talon G1 system allows us to be flexible when working with the city and school systems and to say ‘yes’ to almost every remote-broadcast project.”

Tasked with public, educational, and government programming, PEG TV runs three television stations: one for the city, one for sports, and one as an educational channel for the school district. Until recently, PEG TV had relied exclusively on a microwave truck to handle remote productions, which meant it couldn’t transmit in HD and was at the mercy of available networks and bandwidth. The truck was cumbersome to use, and broadcasting live was too labor-intensive. As a result, PEG TV had to turn down a lot of remote-broadcasting requests.

Now PEG TV uses five Talon G1 encoders and three Talon G1 decoders in multiple locations in all sorts of ways. Most importantly for PEG TV, the encoders can encode multiple streams of different types at multiple bit rates simultaneously. On the other end, the decoder only decodes the stream that’s supplying the best video compression over a given bit rate. This feature gives PEG TV the flexibility to adapt to changing network conditions in order to transport reliably from anywhere. On location, the Talon encoders send video to the PEG TV studio and social channels all from one box. At the same time, the video can go directly from the Talon system to PEG TV’s video server and play to air live from the event.

“Instead of recording to tape or a hard drive on location, we can send video signals over IP immediately and have them encoded to the video server. The video can play out before we even pack up and leave. And it looks fantastic,” Foley said. “We just send video from one or more encoders to one of the decoders in the playout facility, and we can broadcast to YouTube, Facebook, Wowza, and our cable channels in one fell swoop.”

More information about Osprey Video is available at www.ospreyvideo.com.

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About Osprey Video

Osprey Video’s premium video-capture technology has long driven mission-critical video delivery in industries ranging from broadcast, internet TV, and surveillance, to enterprise, government, and aerospace. Now the technology in its flagship capture cards and drivers is the foundation for its end-to-end line of live-streaming and encoding products, which allow customers to satisfy increasingly higher expectations for online video in all environments, including more traditional A/V environments such as education, corporate communications, and houses of worship. The company is continually expanding its product portfolio to meet customer demand for high-quality, reliable tools in ever-evolving video applications — from video over IP to closed captioning, mobile streaming to 4K capture and distribution … and beyond. More information is available at www.ospreyvideo.com.

Link to Word Doc:www.wallstcom.com/SMPTE/180606Osprey.docx

Photo Link:www.wallstcom.com/Osprey/OspreyVideo-Talon.jpg
Photo Caption: Osprey Talon G1 Hardware-Based Streaming Contribution Encoder