Snell & Wilcox Outfits Spain’s MediaPro To Launch HD Sports Service

Snell &
Wilcox has completed a multimillion-dollar sale to MediaPro, a leading media,
production, and broadcasting company based in Barcelona, Spain.
In one of the largest installations of Snell & Wilcox equipment in Europe, MediaPro is driving the newly launched simulcast
of its global soccer (football) channel, GolTV, with industry-leading standards
conversion and multiformat switching systems from Snell & Wilcox. GolTV is
broadcasting 24/7 coverage of global soccer matches.

The GolTV
HD simulcast went live to coincide with the start of regular-season play for La
Liga, the Spanish football league for which MediaPro has international
broadcasting rights. MediaPro has established a new production and playout
center dedicated to coverage of La Liga matches, which also facilitates the
GolTV HD broadcast. Eighteen Snell & Wilcox Alchemist Ph.C – HD motion-compensated standards converters are
used to convert simultaneous, incoming soccer video feeds from international
sources and formats to HD 1080i (50 Hz) for transmission, as well as for
archiving GolTV programming.

Working in
concert with the Alchemist systems are 15 Snell & Wilcox Quasar Ph.C motion-compensated HDTV
upconverters, which convert SD content from the incoming video feeds for
broadcast on the new GolTV HD channel. To further enable the simulcast,
MediaPro has installed Snell & Wilcox Kahuna multiformat SD/HD production switchers in three of its
production studios for seamless mixing of content from SD sources into the HD
production.

“The quality of the final broadcast output is MediaPro’s top priority, but meeting quality goals can be challenging when you’re working with video content that comes in from all over the world, in a variety of SD and HD formats. Therefore, we knew we needed the absolute finest conversion and mixing technology available,” says Israel Esteban, technical director of Unitecnic, the MediaPro engineering subsidiary that designed and implemented the new production center. “The Snell & Wilcox Alchemist Ph.C – HD, Quasar Ph.C, and Kahuna technology are well-known as the industry gold standard, and we knew they would provide the flexibility we needed to receive, produce, and generate any signal in any format, no matter how our production requirements might change at the last minute.”

Over the
past three years, MediaPro has structured its production facilities based on
the Snell & Wilcox IQ Modular
infrastructure system. With more than 300 intelligent building
blocks, IQ Modular components give customers the flexibility to construct any
type of broadcasting facility.

“Our complex installation would not have been possible without our IQ modular infrastructure, which we use for everything from control and monitoring to routing and distribution, video and audio processing, and analog-to-digital conversion,” Esteban says. “These components give our facility the flexibility to accept and deliver any type of video or audio signal, such as composite, SDI, HD-SDI, analog, AES, or embedded.”

Further
information is available at www.snellwilcox.com.