Ascent Media Unveils European Transmission Centre

Ascent Media has announced the launch of its new European Transmission Centre (ETC) in London.
Built to fulfill the latest broadcast playout requirements the new ETC, located at Ascent Media's Stephen Street offices in central London, provides a world-class playout proposition for channels looking for high reliability, and is designed to offer a capacity of up to 32 channels with in excess of 99.98% on-air availability as standard.
The ETC has already received high level industry endorsement from UK and European broadcasters including Information TV, Teachers TV and leading global content brand Sony Pictures Television International (SPTI) which is using the new facility as its European transmission hub. SPTI channels currently being played out from the ETC include the AXN branded channels in Central Europe along with AXN Sci-Fi and AXN Crime.
"Ascent Media's acknowledged expertise in high quality broadcast solutions has been fully demonstrated in the development of the ETC," said SPTI's Ross Hair, Senior Vice President, International Networks, Europe.
"We are impressed with the venue and its in-built capacity to meet the increasing demands of broadcasters like us who need to be certain that playout automation will sync effortlessly with infrastructure. I am confident that the ETC is the right choice to help us meet the objectives we have set for our channels business."
The launch of the new ETC is the first phase of a tiered investment by Ascent Media which will see the scaled development of state-of-the-art ingest and output facilities for clients looking for a turnkey broadcast solution. The ETC offers the potential for clients to achieve affordable, modular growth of their channel functionality over time.
"We undertook the design and build of these new playout facilities to continue to provide our playout clients with an exemplary service that only a state-of-the-art facility can deliver," said Roger Henderson, Managing Director of Ascent Media's content distribution business in Europe. "To this end we worked with our Systems & Technology Services (S&TS) group on the design and build of the new ETC to the specifications required by both existing clients and a new breed of content owners who are looking for flexible and easily deployable network origination, content management and distribution."
The ETC provides a round-the-clock, tapeless, multi-channel environment and a full set of on-site broadcast facilities and support services, ranging from format transfer and duplication to editing, voice over services and studio space. The standard offering per channel includes full specification broadcast monitoring, video/audio level control and up to 48 hours of digitally stored content where optional extras such as DVB subtitling, Teletext insertion and interactive TV insertion are also available.
The ETC brings together technology from key vendors in the following areas: Pro-Bel Morpheus for Automation, Pro-Bel Sirius for SDI/ASI Routers, Omneon Spectrum for Online Video Server, Miranda IS300 for Channel Branding and Graphics, Snell & Wilcox for Infrastructure, Isilonfor Network Attached Storage and Screen Polistream for Subtitling.
(SP)