Playout remoto en Fox International con Playbox Technology

This turnkey project allows Fox to distribute reliable and economical fully automated playout solutions for television and IPTV.

The solution adopted by Fox International has been named FoxBox and offers two redundant channels for remote delivery and broadcasting supplied by PlayBox (brand distributed in Spain by Techex). This innovative turnkey project allows Fox to distribute reliable and economical fully automated playout solutions for smaller uplink markets such as IPTV. The program content is extensive and includes local advertising, branding techniques, multilingual audio and subtitles where necessary, as well as the programs themselves. The first site to benefit from FoxBox is On Telecoms, in Athens, Greece, where two channels, Fox Life and Fox Life +1, have been delivered. The project enables economical delivery of program content within what have traditionally been commercially non-viable markets; due to the cost of fiber or satellite content distribution links. The Athens FoxBox includes PlayBox AirBox playout servers, with TitleBox for graphics and branding and SubtitleBox for program subtitling.

Two fundamental objectives required by Fox were full integration with Fox's current playout systems in Rome and the use of the public Internet for the distribution of all content, playlists and monitoring. The integration means PlayBox accepts programming from Fox's traffic system, searches for content files and automatically transcodes them into a distribution format ready for transfer over the Internet for local broadcast anywhere in the world.

Error checking for file transfer systems is among the many precautions put in place to ensure reliable delivery of content. The system is fully redundant with the main AirBox backup servers in Athens for both TV channels. These are loaded by sending the media files separately to each one, so if there was an undetected problem in the transfer of one of the files, the other server would still continue broadcasting. The remote site includes on-site monitoring and reporting and, if necessary, can be controlled and viewed at Fox's disaster recovery center in Los Angeles.

Julio Sobral, Senior Vice President and head of technical services and business operations at Fox International Channels, commented that FoxBox allows them to reach new distant markets in an economical way, “being a model that we can repeat anywhere in the world that has an Internet connection.” For his part, Don Ash, sales director of PlayBox Technology, highlighted the close collaboration in which PlayBox and Fox have worked for this project, making the most of the experience of both companies in information technologies and broadcast.