Starz Entertainment Chooses Wohler Presto Video Switcher

Wohler Technologies has announced that Starz Entertainment has chosen Presto video switcher as part of its new confidence recording, compliance, and logging infrastructure.

“As we have many times in the past, we turned to monitoring solutions from Wohler to provide this important and vital link in our new infrastructure. The choice of the Presto was easy, based on our long history of using Wohler’s renowned rack-mountable audio monitors,” says Douglas Reither, broadcast engineering manager, Starz Entertainment. “We rely on Wohler Touch-It™ Digital 16-channel video color monitors for our server-based playout system, but for confidence monitoring, we sought a more compact solution. Presto offered exactly what we needed at a reasonable price point, as well as the ability to show the active video for each crosspoint on the buttons.”

Located in Englewood, Colo., Starz Entertainment recently completed a migration to a new IT-based playout environment for its 16 distinct movie channels, including the company’s flagship STARZ and ENCORE brands. The Presto video switcher works in tandem with the facility’s existing Volicon monitoring and logging system, which continuously records the network’s 44 unique HD and SD return confidence feeds. A compact 1RU solution, Presto provides quick at-a-glance monitoring for all of the inputs going to the Volicon servers — making up to 16 sources readily available for monitoring and straightforward switching via integrated OLED push buttons. Because each of the 16 OLED screens on the Presto serves as a switching button that displays an SDI stream from any source, Starz operators can easily see that all of the inputs to the Presto unit have active video. To route the input video and embedded audio to downstream QC monitoring and scopes for verification, operators simply press the button displaying the appropriate stream.

Downstream from the Presto video switchers, Starz has upgraded all of its BOC and Media Encode stations with Wohler’s AMP2-E16V modular audio/video processing monitor. The AMP2-E16V provides dual 4.3-inch OLED displays that make the system ideal for dedicated video monitoring, loudness metering, audio routing and mixing control, and Dolby Zoom functions. In the Starz operation, the AMP2-E16V’s user-defined presets enable operators to monitor simple AES stereo pairs, Dolby E, and 12-channel embedded feeds with ease.

“Starz Entertainment has demonstrated once again just how versatile, robust, and reliable Wohler solutions can be for many different monitoring requirements in an operation,” says Kim Templeman-Holmes, Wohler’s EVP of worldwide sales. “From instant monitoring of the health of playout systems, to fine-tuning of audio quality, to handoff of return confidence feeds to an off-air monitoring and logging system, Wohler monitoring solutions are ideal for broadcasting environments of any size and complexity.”