124 achieve record timeshift with Edifis Sting

124 Facilities, a company within 4Ventures, the commercial arm of Channel 4 Television, purchased an Edifis Sting dual-channel disk recorder for a highly unusual application.
Installed in Channel 4's Westminster transmission centre, the Sting is equipped with 19 hours of uncompressed 4:2:2 storage. This has enabled 124 Facilities to timeshift Big Brother US so that UK audiences could watch events exactly one day on from the live transmission time. A combination of 16-hour timeshift within Sting plus the eight-hour time difference between Britain and the US West Coast provided the required total 24-hour difference. Sting's output fed two short-duration disk recorders cascaded to give 10-minute and 5-minute local delay for profanity-compliance editing.
Allan Connolly, Engineering Operations Manager at 124 Facilities, said: "Many viewers would have been disoriented by the eight-hour time gap if we had broadcast Big Brother US live. Sting enabled us to go fully round the clock so that each televised event could be seen at exactly the same time as it originally occurred; the one day gap was for all practical purposes invisible. We believe this to be the longest live-source timeshift in the history of broadcasting!"
Big Brother US was transmitted as a seven-week series during late summer on the digital satellite pay-TV channel E4. Sting remains on site in the 124 Facilities central apparatus room for future projects.
(GB)