CTVOB installs TSL'S TallyMan in largest OB unit

TSL, a leading international broadcast systems integrator and manufacturer, has confirmed that UK-based OB company CTVOB has purchased and installed a TSL TallyMan system for its largest OB unit, OB 4.
TallyMan is TSL's new tally and UMD configuration system. With the growing complexity of tally systems, and the increasing need for customer-controlled reconfiguration, TallyMan allows the user to interface to any hardware and readily reconfigure the tally system as required.
CTVOB's OB 4, a 30-camera unit that has recently been deployed at the Athens Olympic Games, needed a tally and UMD configuration system that can be dynamically altered by the user to match the requirements of any given job. Specifically, for the Olympics it needed a system that could follow the sources selected on the vision mixer. Given the sheer scale of the core architecture on OB4 - a 256 x 320 Pro-Bel Eclipse router is installed as well as an 80 x 80 Calypso vision mixer that is effectively another router - CTVOB decided that its existing tally control system needed to be upgraded.
Mike Bell, Vision Supervisor with CTVOB, said: "There are two factors involved in our decision to purchase TallyMan. One is the sheer size of OB4 and the demands that places on the tally system. The second, and this is the core factor, is the ability that it provides to define what you have in your system. The nature of any OB is that it changes from one job to another. While the previous TSL solution was very good, TallyMan allows us to derive tallys as and when we want without requiring TSL's assistance to do so. The user can now define the components in a given system and change them as required."
CTVOB, which is owned by National Mobile Television, covers a wide range of both sport and light entertainment. Contracts include European golf tour coverage, Sky cricket, Sky Boxing, ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’, ‘Fame Academy’ and the BAFTAs.
"It is with events like the BAFTAs that TallyMan will really come into its own," added Bell. "In situations like that where you have a range of different vision and presentation mixers, with an associated wide range of monitors and screens, and sometimes multiviewers as well, TallyMan will provide us with the flexibility that we need."
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