In Broadcast - April 2013 - 66

I N T E R N A T I O N A L

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 18 - APRIL 2013

N E W S

InMEDIA

TSL PPL Broadcast Solutions At NAB
T

66

SL Professional Products Ltd
(PPL) will present a selection of
new audio, loudness, tally, power
distribution and surround sound
capture and processing solutions
at NAB 2013.
“Having been incredibly active
in the USA for the past couple of
years, TSL PPL is fast becoming the
manufacturer of choice for many US
broadcasters,” says Chris Exelby,
Managing Director of TSL PPL. “Our
audio monitoring line, in particular,
has been incredibly successful,
with a number of high-proﬁle and
forward-thinking television networks
adopting TSL PPL’s technology. At
TSL PPL, we are constantly striving
to produce and deliver cutting-edge
broadcast solutions that keep pace
with the industry’s changing needs
and demands for efﬁcient
content delivery.”
TSL PPL has a vast
range of audio monitoring
solutions in its product
line, many of which have
been installed by major
broadcasters across
the globe. At NAB, the
company will launch its
new SAM1-3GM
TSL PPL
Managing Director
Chris Exelby

Studio Audio Monitoring Solution
and showcase the Monitor Plus
Audio (MPA) and PAM Pico product
ranges for audio monitoring.
The SAM1-3GM, a ﬂexible, intuitive
system ideal for broadcasters and
content producers alike, offers
seamless operation in settings
ranging from multi-language and
surround sound/stereo production to
live sports and event broadcasting.
“It is also capable of impressive
functionality for EVS monitoring,
Master Control, Ingest operations
and throughout broadcast
production environments. Previously,
the array of features offered by this
unit had been found only on costexorbitant devices,” says Martin
Dyster, Head of Audio, TSL PPL.
The Monitor Plus family offers
robust entry-level audio
monitoring, with the same
performance elements
found in TSL PPL’s high-end
conﬁdence monitoring line.
At NAB, the MPA1-3G, which
provides comprehensive
de-embedding capabilities
and accepts any SD or HDSDI signal up to and
including 3G, will
be featured. TSL
will also exhibit
the MPA1-ASB+

and –ASC+
units, which
are available
in
dual
or eightstereo-input
versions
and
are
built around
a brand new
hardware
platform.
Recent
enhancements to
the MPA1- TSL PPL PAM PiCo Four audio & loudness meter features a landscape
mode, screen grab application and FTT spectrum analyser
ASB+ and
–ASC+ units include upgraded
four models are equipped with
power ampliﬁers and speakers for
loudness measurement tools
improved clarity, as well as a master
compatible with EBU, ITU and
volume control that can also be
ATSC recommendations, AES
used to set levels sent to an external
and analogue audio inputs and
monitoring system.
moving-coil meter emulation. The
latest, PAM PiCo Four, features
TSL Professional Products Ltd.’s
PAM PiCo is a compact, comprea landscape mode, screen grab
application and FTT spectrum
hensively equipped standalone
audio and loudness meter featuring
analyser as standard.
the StarFish surround sound display.
TSL PPL will also exhibit its
Simple to use and easy to conﬁgure,
SoundField surround microphones
it puts high-quality metering within
and upmix/downmix solutions, as
easy reach of anyone involved in
well as its ﬂagship TallyMan product
sound production.
range, which provides seamless
PAM PiCo handles stereo or
cross-equipment communications
5.1 metering with a vast array of
for the broadcast industry.
user-selectable bar graphs. All

Making Your Broadcast Industry Workﬂows Work
By Tony Taylor
Chairman & CEO
TMD

he word workﬂow has become
so ubiquitous in the broadcast
industry, it is all too easy to forget
what it means. A workflow is,
literally, the way that work ﬂows:
the steps taken – by hardware and
by people – that make an objective
happen.
So, of course, we have always had
them. For 60 years, for example, we
have had the workﬂow identify the
toothpaste commercial and prepare
it for transmission. When we ﬁrst
implemented this workﬂow, it meant
“send a runner to the library, collect
the ﬁlm of the commercial, take it to
the editor who will splice it up with
the other commercials in the break,
then take the reel to the transmission
telecine and lace it up”. Today we
can probably manage something a
bit more slick.
Asset management started as
a practical necessity: if we store

T

content as ﬁles we have to be able
to ﬁnd them again. But forward
thinking vendors realised that the
intelligence in an asset management
system could also be used as a
“workﬂow engine”: it could link to
other systems and make workﬂows
happen. Tell it what to do and the
computer will do it.
Not only can a workﬂow engine
collect our toothpaste commercial
from the archive and transfer it to
the playout server, it can route it via
an automated quality control system
and only if it passes send it to the
playout server.
Until now, though, the workﬂows
in a workflow engine tend to
be hard-coded, either by the
asset management vendor or
by a programmer working for
the broadcaster but well versed
in the architecture of the asset
management system. Workﬂows
become really cool when they can
be set up easily and quickly.
So the next generation of asset
management systems will include
the means to create workflows,
using a simple drag and drop user
interface, which is readily accessible
by the user. TMD is leading this new

Mediaﬂex Content Intelligence with automated task
routing based on content and database metadata

re v o l u t i o n
with a new module for
our standard product, Mediaflex CI.
Mediaﬂex has always had the
ability to drag and drop to create
workﬂows, although the new module
makes it neater and even simpler to
understand what the workﬂow will
do and what the interdependencies
are. As service-oriented architectures using standards like FIMS
become more prevalent, then
it will be very easy to add more
devices from more vendors into

the workﬂows,
rather than
rely on pointto-point APIs.
T h e s e
workflows
depend upon
intelligent
decisionmaking based
on analytics:
the results of
each stage
affect the next,
including more subtle calls than
simply pass or fail the auto-QC.
If the decision-making is the
second advance, then the ability
to communicate business analytics
up the chain is the third. Mediaﬂex
CI can report how the system is
performing in commercial terms
up to the enterprise management
system. So the value of the
workﬂow engine, embedded in the
asset management system, is now
seen from the board room to the
transcoder farm. That is the way
work should flow.
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/dir/?first=Phillip&last=Izzard&search=Go https://twitter.com/inbroadcast http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpzEatLsHdE&feature=youtube_gdata_player https://www.facebook.com/InBroadcast http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/inbroadcast/id468652679?mt=8 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.branded.inbroadcast&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwyLDEsImNvbS5icmFuZGVkLmluYnJvYWRjYXN0Il0 http://WWW.INBROADCAST.COM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkCzVtdYL8s http://www.tmd.tv/mediaflex
In Broadcast - April 2013

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