Rogers Media chooses Quantel for 24 hour Rogers Sportsnet

One
of

Canada’s
largest communications companies, Rogers Media, has chosen a Quantel Enterprise
sQ server-based production system for its Canadian cable television sports
specialty channel, Rogers Sportsnet. System integration will be provided by
Applied Electronics.

The
Rogers Media system comprises eight sQ servers with 1000 hours of HD storage.
Eighty-four sQ Views, 14 sQ edit software and six sQ edit plus systems, two sQ
records and four sQ plays round out the news production system. Rogers
Sportsnet is seen by 174,000 people a day.

“Quantel
is a company that understands broadcasting,” said Frank Bruno, Vice President,
TV Engineering for Rogers Media. “They specialize in it and aren’t trying to be
all things to all people. We opted for the sQ for many reasons–the main being
that we needed to go HD and we loved Quantel’s easy to use interface.”

In
addition, the system they ultimately went with had to be ‘proven’ technology. Bruno
said they weren’t in the position “nor did we want to be in a position” to be
the first company to use an untested product.

“One
of our prerequisites was the system had to support 120 users at all times,”
said Bruno. “It had to be robust and possess built-in back up mechanisms and it
had to have the toolsets for all these applications to be simple to use.
Quantel met all of our criteria.”

Rogers
Media plans to start rehearsing with the system the first of November.

Enterprise
sQ is specifically designed for live broadcasting, providing a true one-stop,
no-copy production environment, with ingest, editing and playout all being
achieved in the same box.