KESQ Breaks New Ground with MediaFire IP

News-Press Gazette Begins Company-Wide Rollout of Latest
Splicing Technology Advances at Their Palm Desert, California Station

Gainesville, FL, April 14, 2010 – Digital Broadcast, a leading producer of master control and newsroom automation products, has announced the installation of its MediaFire IP Automated Master Control System at News-Press Gazette’s KESQ. This is the premiere installation of NPG’s rollout of similar state-of-the-art systems at their stations in California, Arizona, Oregon, Idaho, Texas and Colorado.

Digital Broadcast’s MediaFire IP playout provides multichannel splicing of MPEG2 and MPEG4 media for direct feeds to cable or a transmitter. The system maintains the streamed MPEG network so that no baseband switching or keying is required. As well, it allows ingest of ASI and Ethernet directly from digital satellite receivers. It requires no decoding to baseband and re-encoding into the MediaFire Video Server.

MediaFire IP includes an Automated Scheduled Record (ASR) feature which allows feeds to be selected via time of day scheduling. With this, the system has the ability to capture user-selectable programs out of a multiprogram transport stream.

MediaFire IP offers direct interfaces to PitchBlue and Pathfire, eliminating the time and work of preparing syndicated content for air. Syndicated programming received from PitchBlue or Pathfire is transferred to the MediaFire IP automatically. MediaFire IP also features interfaces with DG FastChannel for direct, native MPEG-2 transfers.

The versatile MediaFire IP supports MPEG2 and MPEG4 compressed ASI transport streams and video over IP as SPTS (single program transport streams) and MPTS (multi program transport streams).

MediaFire IP’s statistical multiplexer enables simultaneous playout of HD and SD channels as well as multiple HD channels and multiple SD channels. ASI and SMPTE 310 outputs are supported. It also provides for multiple cable and STL feeds. With the MediaFire IP, incoming material is scaled to HD and/or SD as needed and the bitrate is automatically conformed for playout.

The system splices the material and selects the output sources according to the MediaFire Automation schedule, thus bypassing the need for additional switching, encoding or muxing equipment. EAS and PSIP interfaces are supported.

“We really like the reduced infrastructure required by this system,” notes Jim DeChant, NPG Broadcast’s Director of Technical Operations. “It is format agnostic and flexible, making it simple to add mobile channels.”