Liberty Corporation Standardizes On Thomson Grass Valley Zodiak Digital Production Vision Mixer
(International Broadcasting Convention 2002 – Booth 8.151) Amsterdam, 12 September 2002 – With stations that rank among the top-rated in their respective markets, the station group Liberty Corporation plans to standardize all 15 of its broadcast properties in the United States on the Thomson Grass Valley Zodiak™ Digital Production Vision Mixer.
As a key component of its digital rollout strategy, Liberty Corporation will integrate Zodiak systems with the Thomson Grass Valley Profile® XP Media Platform systems it has deployed over the last three years for play-to-air applications and internal file distribution. The Zodiak system provides control of the entire Profile family of products and other Thomson Grass Valley external production equipment.
Liberty also intends to deploy Thomson Grass Valley signal routing products across its stations as part of its move to support digital production.
"After careful evaluation of many different products, we selected the Zodiak Production Vision Mixer because of its superior approach to solving our production needs as a system," said Steve Smith, Vice President, Engineering and Technology of Liberty Corporation. "Our stations require the highest return on capital investments to meet their financial objectives. Zodiak provides us the best price/performance ratio in the marketplace, allowing Liberty to leverage our DTV investments with existing equipment to provide the most integrated presentation of content for our viewers. Our customers expect high-quality broadcasting, and with Thomson Grass Valley products, we're aggressively meeting the growing production challenges."
"Our vision mixers continue to be the brand of choice of broadcasters worldwide," said Marc Valentin, Vice President of the Thomson Grass Valley business. "The digital needs of small- to mid-market stations, such as those of Liberty Corporation, are a perfect fit for the capabilities of the Zodiak system."
Production Advantage for Regional "Zone" Coverage
The Zodiak system includes a wide range of features to improve production workflow and enhance a station's on-air look. Integrated transform engines and re-programmable downstream keyers are a key feature requirement for Liberty's local stations to uniquely tailor news production for regionally specific "zones" in cities such as Valdosta, Georgia, Lafayette, Louisianaand Florence, South Carolina.
The Zodiak system's ability to transfer files via FTP protocol from an external graphics device to the vision mixer's built-in 100-frame still-store system is another big advantage for Liberty, enabling its stations to access a wide variety of graphic elements that will greatly improve their production capabilities.
Additionally, the vision mixer's dual aspect ratio functionality will enable Liberty stations to produce wide screen programming for future digital television broadcasting.
First Two Systems Already Delivered
Liberty recently took delivery of two Zodiak systems to upgrade its stations WSFA-TV in Montgomery, Ala. and WIS-TV in Columbia, S.C., with integration scheduled to take place later this fall. Upon completion, Liberty will replicate the Zodiak control rooms in all of its stations, located in small markets across the United States.
About The Zodiak Digital Production Vision Mixer
The Zodiak Digital Production Vision Mixer is an intuitive, full-featured production system that lets users in sports arena, mobile, post-production, and broadcast facilities cost effectively expand their production capabilities or replace their aging analog vision mixers. Compact, powerful, and affordable, its offers include 2.5 and 3 M/E configurations. Both feature the familiar Grass Valley™ interface, low power consumption, and fit into a compact seven rack-unit (RU) frame.
About Thomson
With sales of 10.5 billion Euros (U.S. $ 9.3 billion) in 2001 and 73,000 employees in more than 30 countries, Thomson (Euronext: 18453) (NYSE: TMS), provides a wide range of video (and enabling) technologies, systems, finished products and services to consumers and professionals in the entertainment and media industries. To advance and enable the digital media transition, Thomson has five principal activities: Digital Media Solutions, Displays and Components, Consumer Products, Patents and Licensing and New Media Services. The company distributes its products and services under the THOMSON, RCA and TECHNICOLOR brand names. For more information: www.thomson-multimedia.com.
A business within Thomson Digital Media Solutions, Thomson Grass Valley delivers open, integrated digital products that work together along the entire digital video chain to support a variety of workflows, from content capture and acquisition through production, post production, and transmission. With a proven track record in broadcast, including 17 Emmy® and multiple industry awards, it offers an award-winning, robust product portfolio that touches more high-quality content than any other; product and systems expertise that has yielded hundreds of patents and a number of industry standards; and worldwide software engineering expertise and customer support teams that are second to none.
For information about Thomson Grass Valley products please visit www.thomsongrassvalley.com.
Grass Valley Group, 400 Providence Mine Road, Nevada City, CA 95959. Tel: 888-526-8554 ; Fax: 503-627-5224.