EBU chooses Quantel’s ‘complete system in a box’ for Torino winter sports extravaganza

The EBU has once again chosen Quantel server-based production technology for its sports highlights production, this time at the Torino 2006 Winter Olympics.
This follows the EBU’s success with Quantel sQ server-based systems at both the 2004 Summer Games and the Euro 2004 football championships in Portugal.
For the Torino Olympics, the EBU has selected two of Quantel’s recently introduced Newsbox systems to implement and manage the production of daily news reports and highlights at the games.
Two 60 minute daily reports will be produced on the Newsboxes and distributed to all the EBU’s 74 members spread through 54 countries in Europe, Northern Africa and the Middle East, as well as to an additional 48 Associates in 29 further countries.
“Any major international event is potentially a massive organisational and technological nightmare – no two event requirements are ever the same,” said Norman Rouse, Quantel Group marketing manager. “The totally integrated production concept that Quantel has pioneered removes one very major worry from any event manager’s list - the Newsbox ‘news system in a box’ concept is as close to plug-and play, worry-free broadcasting as is reasonably possible.”
The Newsboxes will be the Newsbox Four and Newsbox Five models, each handling the production of highlights for different disciplines within the Games, and providing the security of 100 per cent system redundancy that near-live event coverage by its nature ideally requires. Each Newsbox is a complete, self-contained system with 110 hours of storage of broadcast and co-located browse material, QRecord and QPlay automation, and a number of sQ View and sQ Cut applications for selection and editing of material. (CD/SP)