Playout system for state college TV station

[360 Guy]

Jimmy,

Call me up and I’ll tell you how to get set up with a brand new Image Server for much less than $15,000.

Greg
Director of Sales
360 Systems
(818)735-8223

[JimmyCarter] “Name: JimmyCarter
Date: Apr 26, 2007 at 2:10:03 am
Subject: Playout system for state college TV station

Okay, so I’m the newly-appointed Operations Manager for the student TV station here at UConn. They do a good job with what they have, but the biggest crunch point in our workflow is the ingest/playout system. We’ve got a Leightronix TCD I/P as a scheduler, and another Leightronix product, a TCD R/P as a playout/ingest device. The R/P is a piece of crap, to put it lightly. No ability to load files over the network, you have to play it back over a DV tape, through a composite connection, to load it in.

Oh, and the MPEG encoder is so lousy that the audio drifts over time, and you have to hit “reset” before you hit “record” or else you will have a 1+ second lag of the audio.

The I/P scheduler has a VDCP interface we can buy, which opens up a lot of options playout-wise. I looked at that 360systems Imageserver2000 (slightly too expensive, might be an option), the newest Leightronix recorder (their previous products give me no confidence), and a building4media setup (a bit TOO full-featured, requires ripping out some of our setup). I contacted Bug.TV, but for some reason it seems that sales people these days don’t like answering emails about people wanting to buy their equipment.

All we need is 1 input and one output, and the ability for it to play out DV files (doesn’t seem too hard). The 1 input is optional even, we’ve been looking at picking up another Mac Pro with an Aja card for capturing the SDI output of our switching board.

We’re just in this annoying spot between something like a public-access station or generic educational channel and a small broadcaster. We have a decent chunk of money, but wouldn’t like to go over $10,000 since if we do that we have to go out and get public bids from vendors (got to love state institutions), but that’s not a hard limit. $15,000 is a fuzzy line that I’d like to not cross, but if its something that is designed so well you’d think that Apple designed it, I’d be willing to put down for it.”

[Fsavard]

Hello Jimmy,

I was really surprised, as anybody would, when reading your post.

You stated that ” I contacted Bug.TV, but for some reason it seems that sales people these days don’t like answering emails about people wanting to buy their equipment.”

Just for your information. In 2004, we gave free licenses of our ListPlayer Express software to your student TV at UConn, as we do with any student operated TV Station in the world. We would have done the same thing for you this year.

By the way, we have no trace of e-mails from UConn this year.

We have a toll-free number listed on our website.

Best,

Fran