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Of Interest To SatBroadcasting™ Professionals… More NAB 2011 Wonderments

  • Arqiva will launch a new DVB-S2, MPEG-4 shared multiplex satellite platform (mux) from its Los Angeles teleport, enabling broadcasters and cable programmers unrivalled access to 100 percent of US cable headends. This new cable distribution platform will ride on SES World Skies‘ AMC-10 satellite located at 135 degrees West and will be powered by Cisco‘s latest generation MPEG-4 encoding technology. Reaching a potential 100 million US homes, the service will go live in third quarter 2011. By managing the encoding, multiplexing and delivery to AMC-10, Arqiva ensures that its customers have the latest in advanced C-band digital transmission services to US cable headends. Arqiva will also be providing conditional access management for the Integrated Receiver Decoders (IRDs). In addition, the Los Angeles teleport will have a 24/7 dedicated phone and email support help desk for IRD management. AMC-10  is home to one of the world’s largest cable neighborhoods. With 24 C-band, 36 MHz transponders, AMC-10 covers North America, including Canada, Mexico, the United States and the Caribbean.

  • SAN Solutions Inc. has debuted two new product lines in its ArtiSAN Storage Platform family. The ArtiSAN 9400 series is designed for high-performance film and video applications, and the ArtiSAN 5400 series is ideal for compressed HD media production, audio post, and near-line, high-capacity media storage. Both products are making their international debut this week at the 2011 NAB Show in the SAN Solutions’ booth, SU3725. The ArtiSAN 9400 series is an enterprise-class, highly available storage system that meets broadcast and post-production performance requirements. The ArtiSAN 9400 supports multiple streams of 2K/4K media as well as all HD video streams including 3G and 3D applications. The ArtiSAN 9400 is offered in both a 2-RU, 24-bay, 2.5-inch drive enclosure form factor and a 2- RU, 12-bay 3.5-inch drive enclosure form factor. The platform includes SAN Solutions’ dual active high-performance RAID controllers, featuring the highest performing hard disk and solid- state drives available today. The ArtiSAN 5400 platform is also offered in a 2-RU, 24-bay, 2.5-inch drive enclosure form factor and a 2-RU, 12-bay 3.5-inch drive enclosure form factor. It comes available in both a single controller and a dual active controller configuration. 8-Gb Fibre Channel, 6-Gb SAS, and 1-Gb iSCSI controller types are available. Point-in-time volume images, remote volume mirroring, and remote replication services are optional features in this product series, enabling an effective disaster recovery storage implementation.

  • Utah Scientific is introducing embedded-audio signal processing for its popular UTAH-400 series digital routing switchers at the 2011 NAB Show. The new capability comes courtesy of a new line of I/O boards that rely on advanced FPGA (field-programmable gate array) technology to perform signal processing. Utah Scientific will demonstrate its UTAH-400 router with the embedded-audio enhancement at its NAB booth, N4511. In the past five years, embedded audio has become the norm in media operations of any significant size. Embedded audio supports a more streamlined system overall, but its inflexibility can make it difficult to shuffle audio channels as needed in larger, integrated facilities where quick changes to live feeds are common. Now Utah Scientific has built advanced signal processing into the router’s I/O board, meaning it can deserialize and decode a signal into its component data streams without compromising the router’s overall operational reliability. As a result, audio channels are shuffled automatically without an outboard device or manual intervention. The enhanced UTAH-400 routing systems also incorporate a virtual control panel to provide an easy-to-read display of the video signals and their associated audio positions. The GUI design enables control of digital signal processing functions and other signal configuration information. More info at https://www,utahscientific.com

  • Volicon is showcasing a series of updates that extend the flexibility of its Observer® Professional video content monitoring and logging system, which are being demonstrated at the Volicon booth SU5902 at NAB 2011 and featured within the Microsoft® booth SL3812. Chief among these updates are a newly designed Manual Scheduled Recording Module (MSRM) option that enables recording without requiring an EPG (electronic program guide) subscription service, plus new support for Observer Pro Silverlight® interface flexibility, an option that can run on fully redundant, RAID-5 Observer Enterprise hardware to enable much broader use of Observer tools and recorded media across an organization. The Observer Professional’s MSRM gives users a fully integrated interface for selecting and recording upcoming programming content simply by scheduling the appropriate time segment and channel. Thus, when a subscription EPG service is unavailable by region or beyond an organization’s budget, Observer Professional users can set up selective recording as easily as they’d make an appointment in an online calendar. The interface’s built-in recurrence and conflict-resolution features ensure reliable set-it-and-forget-it background recording, even with many users scheduling record events simultaneously. Based on Microsoft Silverlight, the Observer Professional includes an intuitive, streamlined user interface that works on both Mac® and PC platforms, supports Internet Explorer®, Safari®, Google Chrome™, and Firefox® browsers, and enables exports in H.264, Flash®, MPEG-2, or MPEG-4 formats.