Any Workflow

AVECO automation provides the full spectrum of TV technology and networking functionality. This functionality can be defined to suit your approach to operations.

During station design

AVECO's fuctionality and workflow versatility can help customer's optimize the cost and performance of their broadcast operation. As a new TV station is designed, when key infrastructure decisions are made like media bandwidth, storage capacity, router requirements and redundancy configurations, AVECO provides options to balace performance and cost.

This is true for single channel stations and for complex multiple channel, multiple location operations that share equipment and networks.

During operations

AVECO provides the capability and the support for implementing real-time workflow adjustments.

Some examples of the kind of rapid changes in applications we have implemented:

• Customer requests: Please add a one second disable to the event trigger button once it has been pressed. Why? An operator "double-clicked" the trigger button and sent two event triggering signals instead of one. A clip was missed. It happened that the missed clip was the very important clip in the sequence.
• Manual triggers are set to override AVECO's automated playout. At one of our customer's sites an experienced operator dropped a pen on the trigger button that prematurely aired the next event on the playlist. To avoid this accidental triggering in the future, we reconfigured the manual override to be a simultaneous two-button operation (shift-trigger).
• Two examples of customer requests to change the default color rule used to mark events on the playlist:
  

  1. Introduce a dominant color to the playlist by categories of events. Make events from VTR sources blue, from Videoservers green, from the live studio yellow. etc. This solved the problem of predicting operator workload when dealing with a very long playlist.
  

  2. Enhance the default color rule that indicates palyout readiness. From having a the usual red square indicating an event not ready for playout, they wanted the entire line highlighted in red. The customer wanted to scroll quickly through the playlist and immediately see what events were not ready to go on-air.

• A customer with many live studio broadcasts requested we change the on-air countdown format of our system. Typically the count-down clock for an event is set by the preceding event's start. When the playlist has a series of short events scheduled as introduction to the live broadcast the count-down to the live even is not started with enough anticipation to be helpful. Therefore, we developed an optional application to lock the countdown clock to any event of choice on the playlist. Now this customer runs the countdown clock pegged to the start of it next live event.

These changes were made within a few business days of each customer's request. Sometimes, as in the countdown clock example, within hours of the customer's request. All changes were made via model connection to the customer's AVECO system and without affecting the ongoing broadcast.

Workflow requirements can be subtle and change suddenly. Processes can develop a life of their own with unexpected consequences. AVECO's dynamic versatility and quick-response support provides real-time workflow changes that keep your system in step with your needs.

Team Work and Access Rights

Combining AVECO's user access rights with the support of live-team work allows you to define clear roles and responsibilities within and among TV stations. You can set departmental boundaries clearly, from fully integrated to completely independent operations of the master control room, news, sales, and station promotion teams. Access rights can assign permission for procedures by user, by client station, by device, by playlist, by age of clip (say access only to expired clips), etc.

More about Team Work

More about Access Rights

Expanding Workflow Options

Some unique capabilities of our systems expand workflow options. For example, AVECO systems support partial videoserver mirroring. Here AVECO systems maintain a smaller videoserver as a backup to a larger capacity broadcast videoserver. Partial videoserver mirroring enables TV stations to reduce their investment in backup videoserver equipment while maintaining a high level of availability.