Thursday, March 29, 2007

D-Day Debrief


"No presenters were murdered in the installation of this playout system!" - although some came fairly close...

This is the new playout system, which all the fuss is about - NexGen. Over the past two weeks Doug from NexGen has been training up the presenters as well as providing support for the many technical issues which have arisen.

The installation has also required all the music, jingles, and permanent features for each presenter's programme to be entered into the new system. Some of them have worked until midnight many days just to complete the huge job. More than half of the eight studios were ready by yesterday, which was when the switch over took place. From today their old system, Dalet, cannot be used.

The day proceeded without too many dramas, until during the night at 3.30am, when we were woken up by the phone ringing. One of the engineers had been called out by the transmission site in Chile saying there had been several silences. Andy knew immediately that the problem was not enough music being loading into each hour for during the night when there are no presenters present, a problem he has had to deal with many times with other stations.

Today has been mopping up lots of little issues and preparing the remaining studios for handing over.

I apologise that this report is not very technical and take no responsibility for inaccuracies in the detail - I am not an engineer!

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