CLIENT CASE STUDY: STV & Axon

STV is Scotland’s home of news and entertainment, serving audiences with free-to-air and online programming including high quality drama, entertainment juggernauts, current affairs and local productions as well as the UK’s most local news service. The STV Player is one of the fastest growing on-demand platforms in the UK with the ambition to develop as Scotland’s digital destination. STV has adopted Axon’s Cerebrum software control and monitoring platform to provide its playout operations with total flexibility to scale and progress its ambitious plans for growth. 

Control & Flexibility – on a budget

Keeping services on-air and delivering a high-quality no-fail viewing experience is a given for any broadcaster. To ensure STV continues to meet this commitment to it audiences, it sought a cost-effective solution to monitor the health of its transmission chain, which is driven by GV Morpheus playout automation. Serving multiple platforms, most of which are resilient, the solution had to efficiently manage massive amounts of switching simultaneously. It had to be affordable, scalable and easily deployed in parallel to live operations – without downtime or disruption.

Having explored the large network monitoring systems available on the market, none could address STV’s specific requirements for design flexibility on a budget. As Jacqui Finnerty STV’s Director of Broadcast Technology and Operations explains, “We were finding ourselves a bit of a square peg in a round hole.”

An affordable highly-scalable solution

Axon’s Cerebrum control and monitoring platform offered an alternative route, providing STV with a small affordable system to manage switching and rapidly monitor the transmission chain from one side of the automation to the other, across all its platforms. Using SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol), Cerebrum provides a single highly-scalable control layer, with a fully-customizable graphical interface to visualize and manage a huge range of multi-device systems and complex workflows. It simplifies the process with a powerful logic that shields operators from complexity and gives them the freedom to focus on the content.

STV quickly recognised the power of the Cerebrum to drive efficiencies across its broadcast operations.  Thanks to its intelligent modular and highly scalable architecture, Cerebrum has enabled the team to easily grow the system in stages as budget becomes available: adding new functionality such as sending proactive issue alerts to the NOC; salvos snapshots to ensure swift issue resolution; and integration with Axon’s Synapse VANC GNS600 inserters to make the insertion of logos, regional news and local ads much easier.

From a small system to address its initial switching requirement, STV has now expanded Cerebrum to deliver tally management and to control an ever-increasing number of devices across its main broadcast infrastructure including satellite positioning at its Pacific Quay HQ in Glasgow and satellite downlink in Aberdeen. This staged approach to expansion has allowed STV to learn how best to utilize Cerebrum to gain maximum benefit from its advantages.

“If you tried to scope such a big control system at the start, you’d never be able to think of everything it could deliver,” explains Jim Main, STV’s Broadcast Systems and Engineering Manager. “It was only once we started using Cerebrum, we could fully appreciate what it could do and that gave us so many ideas on how we could roll it out and expand it.  There’s just so much scope.”

Self-sufficient control – with no hidden costs

Cerebrum is open by design. It’s been developed to make it easy for users to architect and fully customise their workflows. After training, STV’s engineering team can now program the system and develop workflows in-house – without reliance on support or additional services from Axon.

This freedom is a huge advantage according to Finnerty: “To be able to organically grow the system from within, and build up our own teams’ experience todevelop it, that’s been fantastic. Other larger systems would require onsite visits to scope out what we need and the vendor would have to do it for us. With Cerebrum we’re actually empowered to have ownership of our own system. There are no hidden costs and we don’t need to pick up the phone every single time we want to do anything.”

Confident & ready for what’s next

STV continues to reap the benefits of Cerebrum. Workflows are streamlined and their teams are able to self-develop the system to meet new requirements. Ultimately, the broadcaster plans to develop Cerebrum to provide a wider view of its media workflow, encompassing its digital operation and monitor its Video on Demand service asset creation and transport process. “The beauty of working with Axon has been allowing us to meet our primary requirements and then grow from there. It’s been a great way of building trust,” concludes Finnerty.

For further information, visit www.axon.tv