PlayBox Technology Upgrade At ZNBC

Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation, the state-owned television and radio network, has chosen AirBox Neo from PlayBox Technology as the core of a new playout facility at its production studios in Kitwe.

The newly completed system was installed by Beijing-based StarTimes in partnership with PlayBox Technology Asia Pacific.

Commenting on the new upgrades, PlayBox Technology Asia Pacific's senior support engineer Jeff Tan, said: "The challenge StarTimes faced was to replace a legacy analogue system with a new dual-channel digital playout platform delivering the highest possible operational efficiency combined with no-compromise reliability and high signal quality.

"The resultant system comprises four AirBox Neo channel-in-a-box servers in two-plus-two primary-and-backup configuration. It includes a ListBox Neo PC which gives programme editors the ability to create and edit schedules days or weeks in advance of transmission. ListBox Neo provides facilities such as text search, clip copy/paste and schedule printing. It also has a clip trimmer for simple programme editing.

"Also integrated into each primary server is a TitleBox Neo character generator which gives ZNBC staff a wide range of interactive on-air graphics and titling capabilities that they can manipulate live. The TitleBox Neo feature set includes horizontal crawling text, vertically rolling credits and messages, still and animated logo graphics, analogue and digital clocks, banner slideshows and chat text with automated horizontal or vertical scrolling. Among the additional creative facilities are pre-constructed graphic components, video resizing (from live source or file), window-style display and website content ingest.

"A key strength AirBox Neo is its ability to interface easily with a very wide variety of devices from other manufacturers. The ZNBC installation is closely connected with third party equipment including a vision production mixer and a fast-acting automatic primary-to-backup switch. Installation was completed quickly and training was very straightforward thanks to the very logical AirBox Neo user interface which displays all the information necessary a given task plus alerts when necessary tasks are awaiting attention."

The ZNBC operates diffusion services across three radio channels (Radio 1, Radio 2 and Radio 4) and two television channels (TV1 and TV2). It also has plans to introduce new channels. ZNBC is mandated to deliver an unparalleled public value proposition of educating, informing and entertaining all Zambians by means of radio stations and television channels. The corporation is wholly owned by the government of the Republic of Zambia and was established on April 1, 1988 as a public service broadcaster, the precursor to Zambia Broadcasting Services (ZBS). The corporation's core responsibility is to provide radio and television broadcasts throughout the country. Its other role is to provide signal distribution to other broadcasting stations.

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