Playout and on-air systems

A television channel isn’t a file library. It’s a schedule that has to go out 24 hours a day, with graphics at the right moment, breaks in the right places, and nothing stopping when nobody’s there.

We design and renew playout systems for television channels, community stations and institutional broadcasters.

What we actually do

• Playout systems with schedule automation: PlayBox or Imagine Communications, depending on your needs
• Centralized archive libraries where content is actually findable
• Automated graphics and insertion
• Redundancy and failover with no on-air interruption
• Ingest and content preparation for broadcast
• Automated quality control before air
• Off-air confidence monitoring and supervision
• Migration from an existing system, with no black screen

Migrations without interrupting the broadcast

Changing a playout system while a channel has to keep broadcasting takes rigorous planning. The old system stays in service while the new one is installed, configured and tested. The transition happens only once everything is validated and ready to take over.

It is an expertise we built on site, and we show it in our case studies.

Questions we get asked

“Can we migrate without interruption?” Yes, when it’s properly planned. Both systems coexist while the new one is validated.

“What happens if the server dies at three in the morning?” That’s the question that decides the architecture. We design with a standby and a failover procedure, not with hope.

“Our archives are a mess.” Everyone’s are. We prioritize what costs you the most to search for, and the back catalogue migrates in waves.

“We’re a small channel — is this overkill?” Not necessarily. We’ve delivered complete playout systems to community television. The architecture scales to the budget; the continuity requirement doesn’t.