PlayBox Technology, the leading channel in a box provider for media companies worldwide, has completed implementation of a scheduling and playlist system for Visjon Norge, based in Mjøndalen, north of Oslo in Norway.
Founded in 2003, Visjon Norge is a Christian television channel, broadcasting 24 hours a day to the whole of the Nordic region via satellite. As it is largely funded by donations and with a permanent staff of just 60, it is very important to the broadcaster that its technical processes be slick, intuitive and automated.
PlayBox has achieved this with a turnkey installation including the ListBox scheduling and playlist software and AirBox standalone playout engine. They work closely with SafeBox, which provides secure content management, automatically collect material from remote sources and ensuring that the right files are available for playout.
Visjon Norge sources about half its content from external producers, so SafeBox is vital in keeping track of the material. The PlayBox installation also incorporates highly capable editing facilities, along the broadcaster to tailor material for different times of the day, and to do any conformance editing required. The scheduling software supports them in building a seamless channel output from blocks of planned content to a final, frame-accurate playlist.
“As our channel and our work has grown, so the pressures on our team of staff and volunteers too has grown,” said Øystein Løland, project lead at Visjon Norge. “We needed easy to use but comprehensive scheduling and playout software: PlayBox understood our requirements, and showed how their system could drop seamlessly into our operations.”
PlayBox Technology is a media and entertainment technology company delivering over 20,000 master entertainment streams every day. Drawing on close to 20 years of experience of innovation in channel in a box technology, it now offers a broad range of software solutions running on standard hardware or in the cloud.
The range includes tools for all aspects of planning and managing a group of broadcast or streaming channels, incorporating everything needed for a turnkey solution, including content servers, graphics tools and templates, and planning and scheduling systems as well as the mission-critical playout automation. Designed for minimal operator interaction with non-specialist staff, the intuitive user interfaces are implemented in HTML5 and capable of simple modification to suit each installation.
“Visjon Norge came to us with a specific request,” said Philip Neighbour, COO at PlayBox Technology. “They needed to simplify their scheduling process and secure playout, to reduce the workload and release people for other, more rewarding work. We were able to show them how we could deliver the workflow efficiencies they sought.”
