Multichannel Applications of Video Cart Machines

Increased industry interest in programming multiple output channels from a single location led engineers at Odetics to investigate an economical solution to routing different commercials to each feed. Implementation without duplicating the station's spot library or dedicating a video cart machine to each feed was the basic design criteria. This article describes the design of a break-tape manager (BTM) to meet these requirements and its integration with the cart machine using a local area network (LAN). This approach minimizes the number of VTRs required for each additional channel. The system can manage programming and commercial replay for several independent channels as well as for split feeds, where the programming is common and only the commercials are regionalized. The BTM also accommodates late changes to the regional schedules, which is commonly required for superstation or network operation and is becoming an important issue to local broadcasters as they look for additional revenue streams for their product. The introduction of the BTM highlights the importance of sharing data base information between several automated systems. An expandable network-based system architecture is an important aspect of system design and is vital when multiple cart machines and workstations are in use. The implementation of the LAN for managing multiple cart machines and integrating their operation is also described.

Print ISSN

0036-1682

Published

1992-03

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/J02323