Lakeland Public TV (LPTV) is a PBS affiliate serving northern and central Minnesota with six channels of high quality public television content. In addition, LPTV provides the region with the only nightly half hour local newscast, Lakeland News at 10. LPTV planned a broadcast facility site move in 2015 and, coinciding with this move, decided to replace their aging hardware based automation, playout, channel branding, and EAS system with a software-based solution. The ultimate aim of the upgrade was to reduce the overall complexity of their solution by making the transition using a software solution that used commodity IT hardware for media.

PBS as a whole is keen to adopt file-based content delivery to its member stations. LPTV’s system takes both IP and real-time feeds from PBS with Myers ProTrack broadcast management system, which centralizes content metadata and facilitates multiple distribution workflows. ProTrack moves content from LPTV’s PBS IP over satellite non-real-time (NRT) file store to its new IT-based Cinegy playout storage via an FTP command generated by ProTrack. Files are moved to and from LPTV’s IT-based archive to Cinegy online playout storage, which ProTrack handles in the background.

Using native IPTV support inside of Cinegy Capture and Cinegy Air, the upgraded LPTV solution in conjunction with Myers ProTrack as the traffic system can record and playout satellite downlinks directly without SDI, and output in both IP and SDI for monitoring and broadcast.

Similarly, the use of Cinegy Player PRO to review material and communicate mark-up segments allows received PBS programming data to integrate with the Myers ProTrack MAM – making it the single point of master asset information integrated into ProTrack’s traffic system for channel schedules.

The final long-term consideration was to make sure whatever was put together was future-proofed using widely adopted industry standards – meaning that the software-integrated broadcast solution would perform using only standard file interchange (MXF OP1a) and standard metadata interchange.