room in each of their stadiums, plus a USP desktop control panel,” says Kozlen. “This allowed an operator in the arena to easily tag when to break for commercial.” With the proper controls in place, SCTE becomes a means of controlling and triggering a host of operations. “They used a marker that wasn’t in their system normally,” he continues. “Every time that marker was sent, our system would pick it up before activating or shutting down the keyer for a certain channel. “Because you’ve already got SCTE within your videos, you can take it downstream, extract it out and do anything you want with it. At NAB, we even once used SCTE to control a coffee pot.”
recalls Mark Kozlen, product owner for control. “It was essentially a connectivity test to ping out to their affiliates, so they would stay in sync with them. But rather than having to programme their automation system to send that signal again and again, every couple of seconds, they sent it to one of our units. Here, it was stored and repeated every few seconds, and injected out into the signal.” TSL tech was able to control the input of the SCTE markers based on provided rulesets too, blocking some not intended for wider reception or manipulating them in-path according to predetermined requirements. Inserting these markers allows the network to switch to the main feed, in the case of breaking news for example, without requiring any control at the local affiliate. Sports leagues have sought out TSL for better SCTE control, too. One league needed to instal a better system across their 30-plus stadiums, to improve the roll in and roll out of breaks. “The easiest solution for them was to add our GTP-32 to the machine
WE EVEN ONCE USED SCTE TO CONTROL A COFFEE POT
application is for video on demand, to insert metadata that marks where key moments are, or when a timeout is called. The SCTE markers can then downstream trigger playout and automation, to roll a break or commercial at a time that doesn’t interrupt the action.” One of the other utilisations for SCTE is an ability to take incoming feeds that contain SCTE markers, and then parse out those commands to trigger certain actions – which might include playout content for a particular local region. TSL helped a major US broadcaster use SCTE in order to message affiliates. “They had unique requirements, where they had to repeat the SCTE message at frequent rates,”
Audio. Control. Power.
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