Reorganizing the station “Local access in the Northeast is a little different than in most areas of the country,” says Murphy. “In the Midwest or South, people kind of accept what the cable company will give them, whereas here the towns seem to be more aggressive in negotiating favorable contracts." In Andover, residents have also been very supportive and involved in producing programming. One local access highlight is a show called “There’s Something About Andover,” which offers interviews and feature stories about local issues, produced by the town’s senior center. “They have their own Mac G5 editor that we bought for them,” Murphy explains. Also of note are videos produced by Andover High School’s TV production class, which uses the station’s studio and production gear. “Some of their videos are quite good,” Murphy says. Andover’s contract with Comcast came up for renewal at the end of 2007, and both parties felt it would be better if the town took over the PEG station’s operations. As Murphy and program director Sara Antonakos became AndoverTV employees, they took on a great deal more decision making authority. “I do report to a board of directors,” Murphy explains, “but we’re a lot more flexible. For example, it would often take weeks to get approval to replace a broken DVD recorder, but now I can just call up my guy and have one shipped.” About a year ago Murphy and Andover Public Schools technology director Ray Tode began planning how to use the town’s new fiber-optic backbone for video. The system, now operational, has provided significant help in keeping AndoverTV’s unusual programming within its local-station budget. Moving to MPEG Like many PEG stations, AndoverTV produces programming at meeting sites all over town, including the local high school, town hall, the library and the safety center. “A lot of cable companies have a copper intranet, or I-Net, running through town,” Murphy explains, “which they use for switching town meetings and other routine broadcasts. They’ll set it up so one channel overrides another. You simply turn on your modulator when the meeting begins, and when you shut it off, it defaults back to the first channel.” The Andover PEG station ran this type of system for many years, but with the reorganization they decided they needed Public access alive and well in Andover, MA AndoverTV’s production studio set up for a talk show on the local access channel The Nexus video server and VSI encoder in AndoverTV’s studio rack something better. Chris O'Brien, engineer at systems integrator Shanahan Sound & Electronics of Lowell, MA, explains. “If you’re running a system like this and you have just one event overriding something static like a message board, it works fine. But it becomes a problem when you have an event in one part of town followed immediately afterward by something in another part of town.” At that point the station would need to set up two independent feeds and someone in the control room would switch from one to the other manually. “Not only was it cumbersome,” O’Brien notes, “but as the system aged and with these locations as much as 10 miles apart, there was a noticeable breakdown of the signal.” “Our idea with AndoverTV,” Murphy explains, “was to leverage the new fiberoptic IP network to transport all of our programming instead of using the old copper system.” Murphy says they actually have enough bandwidth to transmit full-frame video without compression, but they went to MPEG encoding to preserve capacity for the town’s many other network needs. The station purchased five AVN210 encoders and five AmiNET110H decoders from Visionary Solutions, permanently installing four encoder
In a year when many Public / Education /
Government stations face budget cuts,
the PEG station in Andover,
Massachusetts has been able to expand
and modernize its facilities.
Reorganized as a not for profit corporation
in January, 2008, AndoverTV is
upgrading its studio facilities and recently
completed a switch to an IP-based production
network. The system, which the
station uses to transport programming
from remote locations across the town,
uses Andover’s new fiber-optic network
cable and MPEG encoders and decoders
from Carpinteria, CA-based Visionary
Solutions, Inc.
“From what I’m hearing,” reports
AndoverTV’s executive director, Wess
Murphy, “nobody has done this before, at
least not in our region. Nobody has
migrated from an analog system to an
all-fiber MPEG streaming system.” That
migration, according to Murphy, has
greatly streamlined the station’s operation
while eliminating the noise and interference
typical of long-distance analog
transmission.
