BATON ROUGE, La.—Louisiana Public Broadcasting has a 47-year track record of excellence in TV master control and in groundbreaking PBS programming. As one of the first to remotely operate PBS affiliate stations across the state (now in six cities), LPB has matured its technology approach at several key stages. We’re just at another major master control room transformation now.
With the goal of educating Louisianians, LPB has played a leading role in many legendary productions, including early partnership with Ken Burns, the famous and hilarious Justin Wilson, extensive leadership in civil rights coverage, the landmark series “Louisiana: A History,” historic coverage of Hurricane Katrina, and great musical specials reflecting the region’s rich heritage.
LPB manages the enormous Louisiana Digital Media Archive (LDMA) which preserves Louisiana’s media history, representing one of the best examples of the partnership between a public broadcast station and a state’s archive. The LDMA also houses the WWL collection, making it a notable example of a successful public-commercial partnership.
Master Control Innovation
Master control innovations have defined LPB for decades. I was honored to serve as the head of engineering at LPB before being promoted to president-and-CEO last year. In LPB’s latest master control upgrade, local-and-remote TV operation is now combined at Baton Rouge for Monroe, Shreveport, Lafayette, Lake Charles and Alexandria. This includes remote stream-splicing for Shreveport to locally insert programs, sponsorship breaks and local promotions.
For many years, using Harmonic’s encoders, LPB distributed compressed video transport streams across its fiber ring to all six LPB stations. When local programming and breaks need to be inserted, it’s best to keep feeds in the compressed domain and stream-splice, to avoid having to use costly dedicated encoders.
LPB’s new automation system from Aveco stands out in its ability to manage central encoding, manage media operations to forward the right content, handle Myers traffic, execute SCTE commands for local insertion through control of the Harmonic platform, and return as-run logs for automated reconciliation back into traffic.
Uniquely, all of LPBs channels—local, remote and stream-spliced—are in one consolidated master control screen, making life easy for operators.
Aveco also handles cloud-based TV and streaming channels in the same system. When we need to use cloud resources, additional channels can simply pop up on the same master control screen as our system expands locally, remotely and via various clouds.
Pooling & Self-Healing
One of the reasons Aveco was selected for LPB’s master control automation was its ability to self-heal. Aveco manages pools of resources and priorities are set to use these resources on-air, in-studio and for preview/QC etc.
For playout, all automation systems have primary-and-backup but Aveco goes beyond this. If a backup resource goes to air (e.g. video server port) Aveco instantly and automatically rebuilds a new backup, dynamically pulling from the pool, path-finding thru the router and delivering fully re-established 1:1 redundancy without human intervention. This is especially important during unattended operation for ingest and playout.
There is tremendous efficiency found in a pool of resources, where appropriate, with guaranteed priority execution, implementing rules from LPB engineering and operations. Media workflow automation and Aveco’s built-in media asset management help master control operators with a variety of tasks and enable unique integration with the PBS sIX system.
LPB has implemented many innovations and upgrades over the years and with Aveco we’ve taken another major step in our new generation of master control automation. The industry keeps changing and our partnership with innovative companies like Aveco help us fulfill our mandate to help grow and improve our services to viewers.
For more information visit www.aveco.com.
