Red Bee Media gets IP ready with Rohde & Schwarz Prismon multiviewer

The IP-ready Prismon multiviewer from Rohde & Schwarz will replace the former SDI system of production services company Red Bee Media.

From its broadcast facilities in London and Salford, Red Bee provides broadcast and “disaster recovery” facilities for more than 100 channels. To ensure that each operator can monitor the right signals, Red Bee needed an easily reconfigurable multiviewer system, which led it to choose Prismon aus Rohde & Schwarz. This software-defined multiviewer works with COTS hardware and is capable of handling signal formats up to 4K UHD.

Specifically, Red Bee has selected the SDM (Scalable Distributed Multiviewer) and MCC (Multiviewer Control Centre) options. The SDM allows “any input to any output” and Prismon to share resources across a network. This makes it possible, for example, to create a single configuration with multiple UHD signals, beyond the decoding capacity of a single system. On the other hand, MCC provides a single point of control for a multi-viewer network. This allows instant reconfiguration of multiple displays, either in response to the intuitive user interface or on command from a system-level automation system.

IP-ready solution

While Red Bee Media currently handles SDI workflows, it is clear that IP will shape the future of the broadcast world. According to Robert Luggar, director of broadcast solutions and platforms at Red Bee, this is one of the reasons they adopted the Rohde & Schwarz system: “We need to monitor around 450 streams, so we need scale and flexibility. Today those streams are SDI, but Rohde & Schwarz demonstrated that the PRISMON configuration could handle that, but more important could easily be switched to IP in the future.”

Andererseits, Andreas Loges, VP Media Technologies at Rohde & Schwarz, expresses his satisfaction at winning the contract: “We competed fiercely against a number of other vendors. We won because we could deliver a drop-in solution, a direct replacement for the life-expired multiviewer, and because our software-defined approach is inherently a hybrid platform, supporting SDI and IP signals, in both SMPTE ST 2022-6 and ST 2110”.