Snell's New Centra Control And Monitoring Platform Wins STAR Award

Snell has announced that its new Centra control and monitoring solution was recognised with a 2010 STAR (Superior Technology Award Recipient) award by the editorial staff of TV Technology Europe magazine at IBC 2010.
Launched at the show, Centra brings unprecedented levels of content monitoring, system intelligence, and reporting to multi-vendor media environments.
Neil Maycock, Chief Marketing Officer at Snell, said: "Centra is the latest example of Snell's many years of experience and core of expertise in control and monitoring. In addition to complete integration of Snell products, Centra provides one of the industry's most comprehensive third-party driver libraries and uses open protocols such as SNMP - bringing a new unified approach to controlling media technology. Centra also integrates seamlessly with Snell's existing MCM Workbench and RollCall suite of control and monitoring products."
Recognising that flexible control and monitoring is much more than device control and simple alarms, Snell developed Centra to serve as a powerful real-time solution that not only manages multi-vendor equipment failures, but also includes simple interfaces and wizards for the easy setup and configuration required of a typical broadcast operation.
Offering more than just configuration, Centra provides an operator-focused interface in which simple recalls are possible with the press of a button and built-in intelligence eliminates confusion and increases efficiency. Snell said that this makes Centra the ideal choice for broadcast and real-time production environments, as well as OB trucks, studios and post-production facilities.
Mark Hallinger, Editor of TV Technology Europe, said: "STAR awards are given to interesting new products that help a user save money or accomplish a task in an easier way. The products selected help advance the industry - some were chosen because of technical novelty or innovation, some because they filled an important gap in the production or transmission chain, and some because they were just cool products."
Kirsty Aldridge, Snell's new Product Manager for control and monitoring, said: "I'm delighted that Centra has been recognised so soon for its technical innovation. While developing this product we constantly focused on ease of use for the operator, but behind its simple-to-use GUIs and wizards, it is incredibly powerful and can help to streamline workflows and increase efficiency across an extensive media environment."
(KMcA)