SIC – Europe’s largest ST2110 facility with Lawo
Posted on: Monday 9th of September 2019
Following a technical upgrade of its Lisbon broadcast center with Lawo IP solutions, including V__matrix and VSM, Portugal’s leading private broadcaster SIC (Sociedade Independente de Comunicação, an Impresa company) now boasts Europe’s largest ST2110 facility to date, with data streams traveling several kilometers. After only four months of installation, SIC’s production teams enjoy the major boost ST2110 and ST2022-7 have brought to their activities.
Lawo supplied and installed 15 V__matrix software-defined IP core routing, processing & multiviewing devices, a total of 39 C100 core processing blades as well as vm_dmv multiviewer, vm_udx up/down/cross conversion as well as several other software modules for the V__matrix platform. The Lawo VSM Broadcast Control System (Virtual Studio Manager) was chosen to control both baseband and IP devices for lightning-fast patch and configuration changes via VSM user panels.
“We studied what the industry was offering and what would be right for us in terms of technological platforms. We were especially interested in what Lawo, Sony and Cisco proposed,” explains José Lopes, SIC’s Director for Operations & Technologies.
“In SIC’s setup, Lawo provides the processing power, Sony supplied its Live System Manager vision mixers and cameras, and Cisco took care of the spine/leaf network infrastructure,” states Carlos Ladeira, TV Systems & Equipment Integrator with SIC. He adds: “The reason to choose V__matrix was mostly related to the flexibility, which no other contender was able to match.”
VSM, Lawo’s overarching, brand-agnostic control system provides extensive control over both IP-native and SDI devices. In addition, “ST2022-7 network redundancy, together with the control systems we have here, like VSM, definitely make our life a lot easier,” added Miguel Inácio, SIC’s Coordinator of Infrastructure Management.
“We can use a production setup in one of our production control rooms and completely reconfigure it for the next program within seconds. In May, we covered Portugal’s EU election. For the first time in our history, change-overs no longer required physically repatching a bunch of cables—with VSM, all went a lot faster.”
Ladeira continues: “We have a 24-hours news channel with a dedicated studio and production control room running almost around the clock. We have not had the slightest issue, so I guess this is a good proof of stability.”
