Pro-Bel supplies gear for Austrian football coverage

Pro-Bel, the premier manufacturer and supplier of routing, signal processing, master control and automation, has announced that its Austrian dealer, AMEC Medientechnik Vertriebs GMBH, has scored a considerable success with the sale and installation of a 256 x 256 Sirius router to ACT Media & TV Productions Service GmbH.
Private Austrian broadcaster ATV+, which broadcasts both terrestrially and via satellite, in conjunction with Premiere Austria, has secured the rights to provide two weekend football shows - a 90-minute production on Saturdays and approximately half-an-hour on Sundays - of the Austrian football league.
ACT Media is the production company hired by Premiere Austria to produce the shows for ATV+.
ACT Media has used Pro-Bel technology since its creation in 1998 - both Eclipse and Freeway - but needed to expand its capabilities for the new productions. ACT chose to use the award-winning Sirius family purchasing a 256 x 256 Sirius. The inherent flexibility of Sirius allowed this single frame to be equipped 120 x 104 SDI and 72 x 88 analogue video. The company also upgraded its analogue audio Freeway to 128 x 112 and installed a COSMOS configuration and network monitoring system, as well as a selection of ICON frames including fibre transmit and receive boards.
Premiere Austria's role is to provide transmission capabilities over fibre, sending three play-in programme parts (baseband video) from its servers using ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) to ACT Media for the creation of the on-air output. The completed programmes are then sent back using ATM for contribution to ATV+ at 25 Mbit/s.
"Because of the production schedules, the timescales for changing the entire routing system were very tight indeed and required us to be very accurate in what we did. We achieved those targets and ACT Media was happy with what we achieved," explained Erwin Keil, General Manager, AMEC Medientechnik Vertriebs.
Graham Pitman, Pro-Bel Group CEO, added: "Pro-Bel designs flexibility and scalability into every one of its products to ensure users can expand their installation painlessly. We are pleased to have been able to assist ACT Media with this important expansion of their services."
(GB)