Ascent Media opens London media center for sports

By Kevin Hilton

SVG Europe Correspondent

Ascent Media Network Services has opened a new Media Centre at its
London headquarters to provide facilities for coverage of major sports
events, as well as for encoding and preparing material to be played out
from the company’s European Transmission Centre (ETC). With the ETC
concentrating on transmitting 14 television channels across Europe,
including Disney Cinemagic in French, the media giant’s first branded
HD service, and Sony Pictures Television International (SPTI), a
facility was needed to ingest and transcode programmes and offer studio
facilities for more occasional customers.

The Media Centre
features a Pro-Bel Morpheus Media Management (M3) automation system for
ingest and transcoding, connected to a Harris Platinum 512×512 router,
which directs material not just around the building but also over
Ascent’s company network to offices in New York, Los Angeles and
Singapore. Both work in conjunction with Viia, a software, hardware and
technical operations platform developed jointly by Ascent Media and
Hewlett-Packard.

The facility also houses two production suites,
with voice booths and basic vision and audio mixers and graphics
equipment. These can be hired by broadcasters covering big one-off
events and recently have been used for presentation and commentary on
European championship football matches. To bring in feeds and broadcast
complete programmes Ascent has communication circuits to the BT Tower.
Regular customers for these facilities include BSkyB and sports rights
company Pitch International.