Sports News Television Kicks Off With Pharos Playtime
Pharos Playtime is installed at SNTV
SNTV has been operating for about 10 years using a system based on analog tape . They wanted a digital system, we looked at the various suppliers and Pharos won both on cost and flexibility. Pharos were willing to provide what we wanted rather than what they had in mind!"
Richard Allingham - Chief Engineer, TWI
On the heels of its recent Manchester United Television project, Pharos announces a second major sports application of the Playtime automated playout system. SNTV, the world's only dedicated sports news TV agency, is now using Pharos Playtime as the heart of a highly versatile production system delivering six bulletins of sports news every day. SNTV's output is provided to television broadcasters worldwide as part of the Associated Press Television News service. Jointly owned by Associated Press and TWI, SNTV is located at TWI's mediahouse headquarters in Chiswick, west London.
Pharos Playtime joins an existing Pharos Pilot MCR broadcast network control system installed at TWI in 2003. Richard Allingham, TWI's Chief Engineer, explains:
"SNTV has been operating for about 10 years using a system based on analog tape . They wanted to invest in a digital system, preferably server-based, to overcome generation-loss and dropout difficulties and to improve the workflow. We suggested that a degree of playout automation would also be worth including. We looked at the various suppliers and Pharos won both on cost and flexibility. They were willing to provide what we wanted rather than what they had in mind!"
"Incoming content is ingested and held on a server. It is then edited on Quantel workstations and the completed stories are picked up by playtime and passed to the Electronic News Production System. The stories are added to the ENPS running order from which Playtime generates a list of the items scheduled for each bulletin, totalling anything from 15 to 45 minutes. Playtime also creates an individual slate for each item. Previously the operators had to produce these slates manually, keying in the title, a short description, dates, line, restrictions, language and so on."
"The new system enables playout to be achieved by pressing a single button at the start of a news bulletin. In addition, Playtime automatically archives each story as a record of daily output. Our staff were favourably impressed by the speed and efficiency of the Pharos system."
Pharos Playtime is unique in its ability to handle an unlimited number of programme component layers and is based on the concept of playing out packages of media elements. This allows a scheduler to create television channels that would otherwise require extensive post-production skills. The first Playtime system was installed at CNN Headline News in Atlanta.
SNTV delivers more than 90 per cent of the world's leading sport 365 days of the year to 850 million people via dedicated global satellites.
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Published on 2 Nov 2005