Snell Wins Key industry Awards At 2009 NAB Show

At the 2009 NAB Show in Las Vegas, Snell walked away with several significant awards recognising the company's industry-leading technologies and customer applications.
Snell, the new company formed through the merger of Pro-Bel and Snell & Wilcox, made its debut at the NAB Show by displaying an extensive array of solutions for the creation, management and distribution of content in HDTV and 3Gbps environments.
The Snell Mach HD, a compact and cost-effective motion-compensated HD and SD standards and format converter, received a coveted Broadcast Engineering Pick Hit Award. The Pick Hit awards, the longest-running technical awards in the industry, are selected by readers of Broadcast Engineering magazine and working professionals in the broadcast, post and network and satellite industries.
Pick Hit winners are judged to have a positive impact on the intended user's everyday work, offer substantial improvement over previous technology, and feature a price point within the reach of the intended users. The Mach HD was chosen for its ability to offer high-quality conversion to support a smooth and cost-effective transition to HD in applications ranging from newsgathering, outside broadcasting and mobile operations to dubbing and teleport/satellite operations.
Snell's new Pro-Bel 800 Series SD/HD/3Gbps routing switcher picked up a STAR Award and a Mario Award, both given by TV Technology magazine. Designed for large-scale 3Gbps operations, the Pro-Bel 800 brings an unprecedented range of new features and functionality to large-scale router design by enabling up to 1152 x 1152 inputs and outputs, a redundant crosspoint architecture, and auxiliary outputs for external devices such as multiviewers - all at the same time.
A panel of TV Technology editors and columnists gave the Pro-Bel 800 a STAR Award because the router represents a preeminent technological innovation and has made a significant contribution to the media industry. Likewise, the Mario Award recognises products that represent significant technical breakthroughs, especially those with the potential to significantly impact the future audio and video technology. The awards are named after Mario Orazio, a pseudonym for a nameless engineer and a renowned technology columnist for TV Technology who pens the industry's widely read column, The Masked Engineer.
Also at the 2009 NAB Show, Snell accepted a Broadcast Engineering Excellence Award on behalf of its customer, The Weather Channel. Snell and The Weather Channel took the top honour in the New Studio Technology - HD category, for a deployment of Snell's Kahuna SD/HD multiformat production switchers. By enabling simultaneous SD and HD operations in the same mainframe, the Kahuna switchers enabled The Weather Channel to complete a migration of its Atlanta broadcast plant to native HD and launch production from a new HD studio - all while maintaining its 24-hour SD broadcast of national, regional and local weather information and programming. The BE Excellence Awards are the industry's standard of measurement for new facilities, recognising innovation, high-quality design and construction.
Simon Derry, CEO of Snell, said: "We're very pleased to earn this recognition, in such a visible forum as the NAB Show, and among some very daunting competition. These awards are further validation that Snell has become a powerful force in the broadcasting industry, offering the tools broadcasters need to address today's economic and technology challenges and to build future-proof operations in a cost-effective manner."
(KMcA/JM)