TNDV: Television Follows Bluegrass Underground to New Venue for Season Nine
TNDV will provide live production services for eighth consecutive season
NASHVILLE, May 1, 2019 — TNDV: Television returns as the exclusive mobile production service provider for Bluegrass Underground’s ninth season, as the nationally syndicated PBS program moves to its new venue at the base of Monteagle Mountain. Located 80 miles outside of Nashville, the new venue, known as The Caverns, provides TNDV with a permanent and efficient infrastructure to optimizeproduction capabilities, labor and costs.
For the past six seasons, TNDV has provided all equipment and technical crew to support video and audio production services from Cumberland Caverns, a challenging location that lacked a permanent infrastructure. Like the previous venue, The Caverns is a naturally occurring underground cave structure located well below sea level. The new venue removes the need to set up and tear down for each performance thanks to a fixed infrastructure built to support video, audio and lighting systems. The Caverns also provides a permanent power infrastructure that eliminates generators and expensive fuel costs.
“We have permanently installed single-mode fiber, which eliminates the labor of running nearly 1,000 feet of cable from the underground facility to our truck parked outside the cave for each performance,” said Nic Dugger, President and Owner, TNDV: Television. “And with permanent high-voltage power onsite, we no longer need to bring main and backup generators that burn gallons of diesel fuel. We simply run our heavy-duty power cable to a disconnect box, power up the truck, and we’re ready to shoot.”
TNDV will continue to bring its Aspiration truck to Bluegrass Underground performances, which this season includes Steve Earle, The Devil Makes Three and Keb’ Mo’ among other globally-recognized musicians. The TNDV team will use up to eight Hitachi SK-HD1200 cameras for native 1080p content acquisition, and has upgraded video production capabilities on the truck with a Grass Valley Kayenne 4 M/E switcher. Aja KiPro recorders preserve and protect all video content, which TNDV sends to external post-production services following color correction.
Audio production infrastructure includes a Soundcraft Vi3000 mixer and ProTools multitrack recording, with Sound Devices Pix270 recorders for redundancy – just one of several protective measures TNDV has built into the infrastructure.
“We opted for two fibers to move audio from the stage from the truck, which provides a main and backup transport stream for 64 channels of uncompressed audio,” said Dugger. “We’re using these the same strategy to move video feeds not only to the truck but to other positions around the stage, including the lighting director’s desk and backstage monitors. The overall environment inside The Caverns is far more production-friendly, and provides with a much greater level of freedom and flexibility.”
Season Nine production is currently underway, with TNDV capturing performances well into May. Bluegrass Underground currently airs on more than 300 TV stations in the national PBS system as well as a large number of radio stations, with a flagship weekly broadcast on legendary Nashville station WSM(AM), home of The Grand Ole Opry (the world’s longest running radio program).
ABOUT TNDV: Television
Formed in 2004, TNDV: Television represents the culmination of over 26 years of broadcast and live production for Nic Dugger, owner and president; and his staff of full-time engineers. TNDV produces events from small single-camera productions all the way up to multi-million-dollar international TV events, and takes pride in building custom solutions for challenging productions of any size, in any situation. Recent projects include the live 4K broadcast of the Final Four Concert Series, the National Christmas Tree Lighting with President Trump in Washington DC, and for the multi-Emmy winning Bluegrass Underground televised nationally on PBS. Please call 615-585-6528 or visit www.tndv.com for more information.
Atlona Appoints N & S Marketing as Manufacturer’s Representative for Residential AV
| Company brings four decades of experience working with residential AV dealers and custom installers throughout the Pacific Northwest
SAN JOSE, Calif., April 30, 2019 – Atlona continues to strengthen its presence in the residential AV market through expansion of its partner network, with N & S Marketing becoming the latest manufacturer’s representative to sign on. Based in Bellevue, Washington, the 41-year-old firm will represent Atlona and its products throughout the Pacific Northwest, covering Alaska, Oregon, Washington and western Idaho. N & S differentiates itself from competitive firms by working closely with the design and architectural communities, in addition to its full-service approach with dealers and custom installers of all sizes. The company’s highly experienced team will also work closely with Atlona’s sales and technical personnel across sales, marketing, training and education initiatives. According to Grover Reed, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, N & S Marketing, the addition of Atlona will strengthen its position as a full-service provider for whole-home AV distribution in the residential space. Reed adds that the strength of Atlona’s AV over IP and circuit-based video switching solutions, notably its recently-introduced Omega Series, will also help N & S Marketing increase its value for light commercial projects. “Atlona’s reputation as a market leader in video switching and an early innovator in AV over IP stands apart, and their solutions were the perfect fit to strengthen our networking and infrastructure portfolio,” said Reed. “In addition to serving residential systems of any size, we believe the flexibility and technical superiority of their solutions will add value to light commercial projects that require huddle rooms, smaller conference spaces, and whole-building AV distribution for restaurants and other small businesses. This is especially important to our growth, as we see residential dealers shifting as much as 40 percent of their business to light commercial projects.” Reed believe that Atlona’s OmniStream R-Type AV over IP platform will help his customers address increasing requests from end users to streamline the infrastructure in homes and businesses. “Moving everything to the IP network is proving much less expensive and easier to manage from an infrastructure standpoint,” he said. “Atlona has found a way to move and manage high-quality audio and high-resolution video content throughout a home or building without having to install 65 different boxes.” The N & S Marketing team will complement their sales and support strategy with training and educational initiatives, some of which will take place in cooperation with Atlona.
“N & S Marketing will be instrumental in growing our presence and strengthening our brand in the important Pacific Northwest region,” said Joshua Trujillo, Regional Sales Manager – West, Atlona. “Their team of experts have quickly gotten up to speed in effectively communicating the value proposition of Atlona, and benefits of our technology, for residential and light commercial projects that cross AV over IP, 4K/HDR switching and distribution, and whole-home AV.” About N & S Marketing Since its inception in 1978, N & S Marketing has been dedicated to providing our customers outstanding product for Residential Audio Video retailers and custom installers and Mobile Audio Video specialists. Our award-winning team is unwavering in our commitment to offering comprehensive technical and installation training, and unsurpassed dealer support. N & S Marketing is the Pacific Northwest’s best source for the finest Residential and Mobile Audio and Video components, accessories, and more. About Atlona Atlona, a Panduit company, is a leading global manufacturer of AV over IP distribution, connectivity, and control solutions. The company designs and engineers innovative, award-winning products for a diverse range of residential and commercial AV and IT markets. Backed by an award-winning 10-year warranty, Atlona’s products are developed to enable our customers’ ability to connect and collaborate with simplicity. More information about Atlona is available at atlona.com. About Panduit Global connectivity leader Panduit Corp. creates innovative electrical and network infrastructure solutions for applications across the enterprise. Headquartered in Tinley Park, Ill. and operating in 112 worldwide locations, Panduit’s technology leadership and robust ecosystem help support, sustain, and empower business growth in a connected world. panduit.com
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Visix Debuts Touch Room Signs with Most Customizable UI on the Market at InfoComm 2019
ATLANTA, GA – April 30, 2019 – Visix, Inc. will debut new user interface designs for both Touch and Connect room signs in booth 2321 at InfoComm 2019. The new Touch UI offers more customization options than any competitive product currently available.
Touch room signs are driven by Visix’s AxisTV Signage Suite software, and support calendar display and bidirectional booking with Exchange and Office 365. Using the platform’s intuitive design tools and CMS scheduler, clients can customize both playback layouts and the on-screen booking interface on the 10-inch touchscreens.
“This is the most evolved room sign on the market today,” says Sean Matthews, president and CEO of Visix. “A lot of people aren’t satisfied with restrictive layouts or pre-formatted templates to show their calendar data. Our clients are creative, so we’ve given them rich, deep features to control what’s displayed on their room signs, how it looks, and how much interactivity they want to offer. No one else offering room signs is offering this level of customization.”
Clients can tailor logos, fonts, colors, backgrounds, interactive buttons, spacing and placement of screen elements, as well as selecting and formatting schedule data. The signs can also be wrapped with custom faceplates to match organizational branding or environmental décor.
Visix will also premiere version 3.0 of their Connect meeting room sign at InfoComm 2019. The interactive display has a new Android UI that has been updated and streamlined for a cleaner, more professional user experience.
“Connect is a great room management solution that doesn’t require our CMS”, says Trey Hicks, chief sales officer for Visix. “That allows for much more flexibility in deploying room signs in all types of organizations, whether or not they’ve invested in digital signage. This new UI will make using our room signs faster, easier and more reliable and secure, for a vastly-improved user experience.”
Connect room signs are a stand-alone room management solution that supports calendar display and bidirectional booking from Microsoft Exchange and Exchange 365, EMS Platform Services, Google Calendars and Delphi by Amadeus Hospitality. The UI allows clients to book, start, extend, end or cancel meetings at the room sign, and has a host of professional space management features like drop-down calendars, room availability search, technology icons and resource reporting, administrative PIN controls and more. The display unit has availability lights on each side, can be poweredvia POE network switch, injector, or DC power supply, and includes VESA wall-mounting accessories.
InfoComm 2019 will be held June 8-14 at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida. Interested parties can learn more about Visixroom signs by contacting Visix at sales@visix.com.
About Visix
Visix, Inc. offers a robust suite of digital signage software, content designs and meeting room signs for any organization wanting to engage, excite, and inform their audiences. Our products work separately or together, are competitively priced and scalable, and have powerful interactivity and data integration features for a unified, enterprise signage solution. Our award-winning service and support teams consistently rank the highest in customer satisfaction for fast, professional responses and solutions. Learn more about Visix digital signage products and services at www.visix.com.
Cablecast Community Media Amplifies Versatility and Cost Savings with Launch of Next-Generation Video Servers
Cablecast VIO series expands native format support and packs more functionality into a single server, increasing flexibility and efficiency while significantly lowering costs
MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA, APRIL 29, 2019 – Tightrope Media Systems today announced the new Cablecast VIO family, the latest generation of multi-format video servers for the highly-acclaimed Cablecast Community Media platform. First previewed at the 2019 NAB Show earlier this month, the new servers expand on the versatility, efficiency and cost-effectiveness of preceding models by consolidating more of the platform’s rich functionality into a single hardware unit and offering broader live and file-based native format support.
Cablecast VIO provides a powerful and reliable foundation for station automation, playout, branding and multi-platform content distribution. Users can take complete control of content scheduling, publishing and playout from anywhere, on any device, through an intuitive, web-based interface. The Cablecast VIO series amplifies the Cablecast platform’s efficient workflow integration by enabling more of its software options to run together on just one server, significantly lowering hardware costs while minimizing space, power, cooling and maintenance requirements.
Most notably, broadcasters can now operate their community bulletin boards on the same server that powers their scheduling, automation and playout. Each Cablecast VIO server can run multiple instances of Cablecast CG, the broadcast-optimized bulletin board software based on the Carousel digital signage engine.
“While Cablecast has long offered seamless workflow integration between its automation and bulletin board capabilities, customers previously deployed our bulletin board software on separate hardware,” said Steve Israelsky, President, Cablecast Community Media. “With Cablecast VIO, stations can add Cablecast CG software for each channel’s bulletin board directly within their playout and automation server, reducing both equipment and operating costs. Bringing the bulletin board software onto the same system as channel playout and on-air graphics such as live branding and crawls will also enable new software capabilities and efficiencies in the future.”
The Cablecast VIO series further minimizes hardware requirements by delivering increased channel density. The flagship Cablecast VIO 4 Plus model provides six SDI interfaces that can be configured as four outputs with two recording channels, or as three inputs and three outputs. “This is perfect for PEG broadcasters with public, education and government access offerings, as they can run all three channelsand their bulletin boards on one server, significantly reducing the overall system price,” added Israelsky.
Cablecast VIO’s extensive baseband I/O is complemented by support for live, IP-based inputs. Building on the RTP stream input featurefirst introduced on Cablecast Flex servers, Cablecast VIO can ingest live, H.264-encoded RTP, RTMP or HLS streams without needing an external decoder or consuming an SDI interface. Users can bring in live feeds of events such as council meetings and sports from remote sites over an IP network, or pull in sources such as YouTube or Facebook Live streams for integration into their channels.
Cablecast VIO video servers also expand on the Cablecast family’s renowned multi-format playout capabilities, which enable media files encoded in a wide variety of formats to be directly played out without transcoding. New codec compatibility including VP8 and Theoracombines with support for non-broadcast-standard frame rates to enable easy use of Internet-originated content. Cablecast VIO also adds space-efficient H.264 encoding for channel recording, reducing storage consumption to maximize available recording time while maintaining stellar visual quality.
Additional Cablecast VIO models offer optimized configurations for customers with lower channel requirements than the Cablecast VIO 4 Plus. Cablecast VIO Lite includes 8TB of storage and two SDI interfaces, which can be configured as two outputs or one input and one output. The Cablecast VIO 2 features the same I/O capabilities as Cablecast VIO Lite but includes from 10TB to 40TB of storage, while the Cablecast VIO 4 provides four SDI channels that can be flexibly configured as either inputs or outputs. All of the above models include the latest version of the Cablecast Broadcast Automation software, with Cablecast CG available as an option. For users without automation and playout requirements, the specialized Cablecast VIO CG model sports the same hardware as Cablecast Lite for dedicated bulletin board applications.
About Cablecast
For over 20 years, the Cablecast Community Media platform from Tightrope Media Systems has enabled community media organizations and content producers to easily and efficiently engage viewers across expanding consumer platforms including cable channels, websites, mobile devices and OTT delivery. The comprehensive Cablecast product line provides flexible, tightly-integrated solutions ranging from broadcast automation, playout servers, bulletin boards and on-air graphics to Internet VOD, live streaming and OTT distribution. For more information, visit www.cablecast.tv or call (866) 866-4118.
CP Communications Strengthens Broadcast and Commercial AV Teams with Two Appointments
Sean Sweeney and Rhett Van Buskirk will focus on business development and customer service across company’s key growth areas
Tampa, Florida, April 25, 2019 — CP Communications, a leader in innovative solutions and services for live event productions, has appointed two broadcast and AV veterans to newly developed positions in alignment with the company’s broader growth strategy. Effective immediately, Rhett Van Buskirk and Sean Sweeney join CP Communications in Senior Account Executive roles for the broadcast and commercial AV markets, respectively. Both report to Ken Dillard, Vice President of Sales, North America.
Van Buskirk brings nearly four decades of broadcast engineering expertise to his new role, including extensive experience as a freelance technical engineer and systems architect in live sports and event production. A five-time Technical Emmy award winner for sports, he has worked on the Olympics, NBA Finals, NCAA Final Four, Super Bowl, US Open (Tennis), World Series and Academy Awards in various technical engineering roles.
Prior to joining CP Communications, Van Buskirk spent 15 years with Bexel as Senior Systems Engineer, where, among other initiatives,he coordinated with clients on the planning, design and development of large-scale, flypack control rooms. He most recently served as Director of Engineering, Broadcast Systems (East) for VER, where he specialized in flypack systems for live entertainment, E-gaming and sporting events.
Van Buskirk will focus on sales and service for CP Communications’ core RF market, while developing the at-home production and streaming opportunities that CP Communications supports under its Red House Streaming portfolio. CP Communications’ Red House Streaming business focuses on IP, cloud and bonded cellular technologies and services, including the company’s new STREAM family of content acquisition solutions.
“We have reached an exciting crossroads in the broadcast and production industry as more events and organizations move aggressively toward streaming, and adopt more IP and cloud-based workflows,” said Van Buskirk. “This has accelerated the rise of the at-home production model, which opens more opportunities to reduce production costs and monetize content. I’m excited to work with existing CP Communications clients and develop business with new clients, emphasizing how our new STREAM family can help them achieve their production goals.”
Sean Sweeney’s appointment is instrumental to CP Communications’ growth strategy for the commercial AV market. Sweeney brings two decades of sales, management and production experience in the corporate, retail and hospitality verticals, and has held Director-level positions for international AV and event technology companies within New York City, Miami Beach, Boston, Latin America, Puerto Rico, and The Caribbean. In addition to managing AV systems and services across meeting and event space, private venues, convention centers,and hotel ballrooms, he built a reputation as a profitable sales and operations leader. His experience includes managing large productions on hotel properties including Broadway-related shows, SAG Award events, professional musical performances, and VIP celebrity events with sports and entertainment stars.
Sweeney believes that with the establishment of its Red House Streaming solutions and a professional control room at its Florida headquarters, CP Communications is well-equipped to capture AV-related production business that increasingly requires broadcast-quality content while maintaining reasonable production budgets.
“CP Communications already services a very high-end broadcast market, and clearly offers the technology and production services toserve large corporate events, for example,” said Sweeney. “The AV industry values service and creativity foremost, with technology decisions often following once the right structure is in place. CP Communications is strongly positioned to succeed in this market based on the unique mix of high-end services and technology platforms they offer.”
“Rhett and Sean bring a broad depth of knowledge and experience in their respective spaces to CP Communications,” said Dillard. “Rhett’sexpertise as a technician, engineer, and onsite team leader make him an invaluable resource for our customers needing everything from custom flypacks to full mobile production services. Sean’s expertise will help us meet the needs of AV clients large and small with high-quality, innovative and unique technology solutions and services. We welcome both of them to our team.”
Rhett and Sean will attend InfoComm 2019 to meet with new and existing customers. As a first-time exhibitor at Booth 4877, CP is excited to have them represent the company and bring their experience to a new segment of the media marketplace. InfoComm takes place June 12-14 at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando.
About CP Communications
For more than three decades, CP Communications has provided high-quality, cost-effective live event production solutions to major broadcasters, sports leagues and teams, and event and production companies. Our solutions include access to experienced professionals, state of the art equipment, and innovative technologies and techniques for wireless audio & video content acquisition, transport and delivery. Our culture of innovation, coupled with the highest quality assurance standards and passion for customer service, promote collaboration with our clients to determine the best custom solution for each live event, whether it’s the U.S. Open, Super Bowl, World Series, Kentucky Derby, Tony Awards, or a political convention, corporate conference, fashion show, parade or marathon. CP Communications offers six HDRF Mobile Production trucks, two ENG Vans, five motorcycles, and a full-service machine shop, and offers a custom design for each event from box rentals through to turnkey production solutions.
Service Highlights
Writing and Media Placement
We are storytellers that understand how to connect with an audience. From newsworthy press releases to technical installation features to provocative thought leadership columns, we will bring your message to a broader audience through strategic, exclusive articles placements and global media distribution.
Product Launch Planning
We are strategic thinkers that will build integrated plans to spread the word on your important product innovations. We have the experts to manage your press announcements, trade show visibility and social media impact - among other initiatives - to make a lasting impact on your brands.
Media Interviews
We consistently communicate with key editors and journalists that cover broadcast, commercial AV and other industries we work in around the world. We will position you as expert thought leaders to secure interviews, Q&As, tradeshow appointments, and other opportunities that keep you in touch with the media - and visible to your customers and the industry at large.