TV9 Surabaya Chooses Playbox Technology

TV9 Surabaya, one of Indonesia's regional broadcasters, has chosen a broadcast system from PlayBox Technology as the core of a major technical upgrade.

The channel transmits programmes from its studios from the country's second largest city. With a population of over 5.6 million, Surabaya is the capital of the province of East Java.
"TV9 Surabaya currently broadcasts in standard-definition and was keen to replace its existing equipment with a file-based system," said Stefanus Tandra, Senior Systems Engineer at the PlayBox Technology distributor in Indonesia, Horizon Global Media, who supervised the project. "The channel managers were initially looking for greater automation than was possible with their legacy infrastructure. They were greatly impressed by the fact that PlayBox Technology systems are so easy to use and so flexible to customise. They also appreciated the system's physical compactness, its inherent reliability and the ease with which it can be expanded to deliver advanced services such as HD as or when these receive regulatory approval.
"The system we have designed for TV9 Surabarya incorporates two CaptureBox servers, two channel-in-a-box servers, a TitleBox, an AirBox and a SafeBox for file relocation and removal. Third-part equipment attached includes 16-terabytes of network-attached storage. The CaptureBox and CIAB servers are configured as main and redundant with automatic switchover in the unlikely event that a primary server fails while on-air.
"Does the system meet the channel's expectations? Absolutely. TV9 Surabaya also greatly appreciates our ability to provide customer training and technical support on a local basis. That is how we secure and keep our customers' trust," said Imam, PlayBox engineer that handle the set up for TV9 from the very beginning."
The central element of many PlayBox Technology systems, AirBox is a universal SD/HD content playout and streaming server designed for continuous unattended operation. Every clip in the playlist, except the one which is currently playing, can be trimmed, edited or repositioned. Playlist order can be changed on-the-fly using commands such as skip-to-next or jump. Changes are performed seamlessly without stopping the current playout session. Live productions are facilitated by a Live Show clipboard, which allows insertion and/or execution of various events or live streams. AirBox accepts formats such as MPEG1/2/H.264, HDV and DV streams from practically every known production platform.
The PlayBox Technology TitleBox delivers on-air graphics which can be controlled interactively. Customers can preconfigure the templates to match their requirements, eliminating any need for subsequent manual interference. TitleBox provides total control during on-air session, including text selection, running speed and transitions.
SafeBox replicates remote content to local playout server folders for safe playback. It can gather content from a number of sources automatically, when new content is available at the remote locations. SafeBox can work in playlist-dependent or stand-alone mode. In playlist-dependent mode, all file operations are slaved to schedule contents. New daily schedules are transferred along with their associated content and file paths in the playlists are automatically updated according to the new local storage. Expired daily schedule content is automatically deleted or moved to a predefined purge folder for manual deletion or archiving. Deletion can be performed automatically or by manual user approval of deletion lists.

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