Harris Broadcast Graphics Enlivens On-Air Quality for City of Las Cruces

The City of Las Cruces, New Mexico offers 24-7 programming to its residents on cable channel CLC-TV 20, with a focus on local government including City Council, public service and other live special meetings.  The Harris Broadcast Inscriber TitleOne AE graphics system is helping the station improve its on-air video quality and channel output while offering a future path to HD — all at a bottom line-friendly price.

CLC-TV 20 is a classic PEG channel, short for public, educational and governmental channels.  PEG channels are carried exclusively on cable television systems and typically operate on lower budgets than traditional broadcast and cable networks.

“Our budget limits us to certain price points, and we were very surprised at the low cost of the Harris Broadcast system based on the features and capabilities it provides,” said Adrian Guzman, media operations and production coordinator, City of Las Cruces.  “We have wanted multiple channels for a long time, and we like that this system doesn’t limit us to requiring a specific output for each channel.  It’s a very flexible design, and I can get much more content out of it compared to other systems we evaluated.”

Beyond operational flexibility and price point, the TitleOne AE graphics system has given Guzman and his team more creative freedom to produce a livelier on-air product.  He notes that the system has enabled his team to incorporate lower thirds with subtle motions that bring new life to the screen.  He also likes that he can integrate and playout movie files with an audio output direct from TitleOne AE — a capability previously not available to his team.

“We primarily use the TitleOne AE for live city council meetings, and before used a separate media player to play our graphic open with audio, and then switch back to the live feed,” said Guzman.  “Harris Broadcast helped us reduce a step and eliminate an extra device.   We’re also doing things that I haven’t see on most other PEG channels, such as picture-in-picture.  Most of these channels also don’t have the crawls and multiple graphics coming in and out at one time.  So I think this makes us visually stand out from other PEG channels.”

Guzman adds that viewer feedback has been positive, notably regarding the new crawl across the bottom of the screen that updates on agenda items.  Moving forward, he expects to use the system for live election results, and believes the station will convert to HD “fairly soon” based on discussions with their local cable provider.

“As soon as we get that permission we are pretty much set to go,” he said.  “Going with Harris Broadcast ensures that once we are cleared it’s basically down to inputting a few different graphics — everything else will stay the same.  So this system really fits all of our graphics needs.”