Originally responsible for the Town of Douglas’ public access and government channels, the station chose a four-channel Cablecast Flex server configured with a trio of outputs alongside a recording channel for live feeds. The expanded capabilities allowed Douglas Cable Access to integrate the town’s educational channel – previously operated independently by staff at the local high school – within its unified playout center, taking the equipment burden off the school while enabling richer content offerings than the channel’s earlier DVD-based programming.

School staff members now manage and program the channel remotely through Cablecast’s web-based interface. “Our previous scheduling system could be operated through just one computer,” explained Pat Aldrich, cable access coordinator at Douglas Cable Access. “Cablecast’s web interface allows multiple users from various town departments to work together from any location. For example, we can now give the police or fire departments the ability to create emergency text crawls themselves and immediately put them on-air.”

The station uses Tightrope’s Carousel Digital Signage Software to power the community bulletin board seen on its public and government channels, leveraging Carousel’s tight integration with Cablecast. “With our old system, bulletins were entirely manually managed,” Aldrich said. “The Tightrope platform saves us a lot of time on the back end, automatically publishing and updating our program schedules on our bulletin board. It is also easy to use dynamic, external data sources in Carousel, and I was able to quickly integrate multiple Twitter feeds into our bulletins.”