BeckTV Designs And Integrates New ST 2110 IP-Networked Facility For WETA Public Media

BeckTV, a premier systems integrator for the broadcast media industry, has completed technical design, facility planning, and integration for the “PBS News Hour” studios and production facility at WETA, the flagship public media station in the nation’s capital.

The goal of the project was to create a modern, flexible, and scalable production facility that could support the needs of “PBS News Hour,” “Washington Week with The Atlantic,” and other shows.

“PBS News Hour,” public television’s marquee news program, is a national nightly news show that has been broadcasting for nearly 50 years. The show moved from its old studios in an aging production building to a newly expanded part of the WETA headquarters and technical facilities a few blocks away.

WETA hired BeckTV to build two control rooms, two audio control rooms, a comms position, a transmission room, a shading and robo room, four tape playback rooms, and 15 edit rooms, among other spaces — all on a SMPTE ST 2110 backbone to enable IP networking. BeckTV planned for all technical aspects of the space, including technical furniture, power, cooling, circuitry, cabling, wiring and RF for all the studio sets, and more.

The two control rooms are identically loaded with redundant resources for resiliency. WETA operations typically uses one control room to run the weekly show out of Studio A, the main studio for “PBS News Hour.” The second control room is typically used to produce another nationally televised show, “Washington Week,” as well as the weekend “PBS News Hour” and other miscellaneous productions.  BeckTV designed the control rooms to be redundant and interchangeable for any production at any moment. In the event of equipment failure, all or parts of the operations can move to the other room immediately and leverage its resources to continue seamlessly, even in the middle of a live show. BeckTV also made sure that the fiber infrastructure was designed for a redundant SMPTE ST 2022-7 blue/red network switch if WETA decides to implement it.

At the core of the facility is Grass Valley’s GV Orbit orchestration system. Grass Valley also provided multiple cameras, two production switchers, multiviewers, gateways, and an audio router. Other major components include Lawo audio mixers, RTS intercoms, G&D KVM systems, EVS tape playback systems, Jetwave Wireless RF distribution equipment, Cisco network switches for management and Nexus 9504 media fabric, Vinten robotic camera shading, and Providius network monitoring.

Because everything is network-connected and interoperable, all audio, video, and metadata are available on the network switches, ready to be sent to tens of thousands of multicast addresses in an endless combination of video workflows. Working with such a robust system requires a good strategy so that things don’t become disorganized and overwhelming, especially for broadcast engineers who aren’t familiar with SMPTE ST 2110 networks. BeckTV planned every flow before it got to the configuration stage and then trained the WETA production staff so they could support the system after BeckTV's involvement ended.

You might also like...

Building Software Defined Infrastructure: Part 3 - Monitoring Dynamic Resource

Welcome to Part 3 of Building Software Defined Infrastructure. This multi-part content series from Tony Orme explores the microservices based IT technologies that are driving the next phase of transition from hardware to software based broadcast systems. This series is essential…

Live Sports Production: Part 2 - Network Infrastructure

Welcome to Part 2 of ‘Live Sports Production’ - This multi-part series uses a round table style format to explore the technology of live sports production with some of the industry’s leading system designers. It is a fascinating insight into w…

Microphones: Part 11 - The State Of The Art… And The Potential Of MEMS Microphone Arrays

Here we look from the state of the art in microphones, to what the future may bring with the enticing theoretical potential of microphone arrays built using MEMS technology.

Broadcast Standards: Part 27 - Standards Organizations Summary & New Themes

Here we begin to build on the foundations of the incredibly well received ‘Broadcast Standards – The Book’ with the next phase of our exploration of standards used in broadcast. As we proceed, we will focus on a number of key topic…

IP Monitoring & Diagnostics With Command Line Tools: Part 2 - Testing Remote Connections

In the previous article, we set the scene for working with the Command Line Interface (CLI) on a UNIX system. Now we will explore some techniques for performing basic tests on our network infrastructure to check for potential problems.