TV Automation & Video Servers

Television Automation Systems

Founded in April 2000, Pebble Beach Systems is a privately owned software company that specialises in broadcast software. With a strong commitment to technical excellence and customer support, the company is becoming one of the fastest growing automation and media asset management companies in the world.

Television is a demanding environment, and much of an automation system demands skilfully designed, application specific software. Pebble Beach’s modular, scalable products can be configured for any broadcaster from a single channel to tens or potentially hundreds of channels across a network. Whether large or small, every system benefits from the same simple and intuitive user interface, highly reliable, mission critical software and comprehensive asset management and archiving.

As well as transmission automation the same products can be used to manage the production and delivery of high pressure live programming such as news and sports. As part of this package Pebble Beach can offer desktop editing for multiple concurrent users, based on its shadow browsing technology, as well as interfaces to newsroom systems such as ENPS using the MOS protocol.

And with interactive television an important business proposition for the future, Pebble Beach has proven solutions on air and earning significant revenues, which provide a secure link between transmission facilities and multiple external data sources.

Pebble Beach Systems provides the modern approach to playout automation: highly configurable, scalable, flexible, future proof and above all proven products, using the latest software techniques and technologies to meet the real systems and commercial needs of the broadcaster.

AUTOMATION

Anemone

A low cost, entry-level product. Anemone has been designed to meet the needs of the small broadcast operations worldwide. It is a frame accurate, reliable, simple, effective and easy to use tool that can be used to run up to four television channels. It runs under the industry standard Windows 2000 or XP operating systems and has a user-friendly intuitive windows user interface.

Anemone has two playback modes; “device” and “list” and an operator can switch between the two at any time. Under manual control clips can be loaded and played back. A software control panel provides fast forward, still, rewind, play and stop functions. Under list control the software control panels provide list control functions for starting and stopping lists and for skipping to the next event in the list. Fixed timed and manual starts are supported.

Summary of main features:

	Supports standard windows editing functions, such as cut, copy, paste, drag and drop
	Support for live events
	Operators are able to build and edit playlists
	Controls up to 4 channels
	Drivers for a wide-range of video servers
	Triggering of GPI contacts can be linked to events in the playlists
	GPI input triggers can be accepted to control list functions
	Material can be ingested from tape or live sources
	Comprehensive logging functions -including as-run, device, error and user action logs
	Options available include adding additional client stations, playlist translators to interface to traffic and adding VTR control for dubbing from tape
	Upgrade path to Neptune

Neptune

Neptune is a full scale transmission automation product designed to automate the acquisition and playout of programmes, commercials and trailers in a TV station. It is built using modern software techniques and runs on the latest PC hardware platforms.

Neptune is a multi-channel, frame accurate, reliable, effective and easy to use tool. It controls a full range of devices, including Cart machines, video disk servers, VTRs, routers, master control switchers and logo inserters. It is a powerful, expandable and highly versatile product.

The team at Pebble Beach continue to develop enhancements to Neptune and work closely with third-party manufacturers to integrate new devices.

Neptune has a client-server architecture. The controller controls the broadcast devices via RS422 or network interfaces and communicates to the clients via Pebble Beach’s powerful TCP/IP protocol. There are clients for ingest, transmission and media browsing. A separate housekeeper is responsible for managing the system database and for generating logs.

Summary of Neptune features:

	Client-Server architecture.
	TCP/IP network protocol for internal data communications between the controller and the clients.
	XML external playlist, dublist, recordlist and asrun interfaces..
	SQL server database which stores information about the television station's assets, such as the ID, title, duration, and other metadata. The database also tracks the location of material.
	Integrated Media Browsing. Neptune controls MPEG1 encoders using a direct network interface.
	Neptune has a multi-user capability supporting any number of users through the addition of client stations.
	Different access privileges are available to suit a station's security needs.
	Multi-channel, able to control several channels simultaneously.
	Frame accurate, ingest and playout.
	Configuration tools enable configurations and user preferences to be set-up. Configurations can be ammended at any time to suit different or new devices and to match different operational needs.
	Neptune is expandable. Allowing an installation to start as a single channel system and later expand by the addition of serial cards and drivers to control multiple devices and channels.

Periscope

Periscope is a new type of client application to help operators manage multiple channels. Instead of displaying playlists in the traditional way with the schedule running down the screen, periscope displays multiple playlists across the screen in a pictorially. This enables multiple channels to be viewed with ease on a single screen.

The Periscope GUI

The Periscope client has the advantage that playlists can be viewed relative to other playlists and potential upcoming problems can be seen at a glance across all channels. Important events, such as live events or missing events are clearly identified by colour.

MOS Interface

Pebble Beach Systems provides an integrated two-way interface to newsrooms systems such as iNews or ENPS using the MOS protocol. Currently MOS version 2.6 is supported and the company is planning to support version 2.8 in the near future.

The Pebble Beach MOS Active X component enables access to the Pebble Beach database via the newsroom system. Changes in the newsroom rundown are automatically and instantly reflected in the Pebble Beach play-out automation and dynamic status updates are sent back.

Fault Tolerance Across The Range

Our products are extremely reliable and have been designed so that critical on air functions such as control of devices and playlists are resilient to client and network failure. To protect against device failure, Pebble Beach offers customers redundancy through mirroring both the ingest and playout functions of the system. N+n is also offered for the more cost conscious broadcaster, where one or more devices can back up multiple playout channels. If a main device fails, one of the spares is switched in automatically and playout resumes from the point where the failure occurred.

Options are also available for a backup controller and changeover switch to protect against the unlikely failure of the main controller. The housekeeper and SQL database can also optionally be mirrored.