The Brazilian TV Cultura migrates its playout to Pebble Beach's Marina automation control

Public broadcaster upgrades its automation environment from Neptune to Pebble Beach Systems' Marina for more efficiency and flexibility with future-ready infrastructure.

TV Cultura, the Brazilian public television network, is migrating its playout operations to Marina Lite, the solution of Pebble Beach automation.

The broadcaster has four main channels that broadcast national and regional news, cultural programming, music, children's programs and documentaries. It also offers web channels and disseminates educational content from the Virtual University of the State of São Paulo. All channels have more than 126 million viewers throughout Brazil.

Maintaining its reputation for excellence and continuous innovation, TV Cultura recently invested in modernizing the equipment and infrastructure of its broadcast operations. Initially, TV Cultura implemented a Pebble Beach Systems Neptune Playout Automation more than 10 years ago, and is now working with Videodata, a systems integrator based in São Paulo, to ensure successful migration to a modern automation system Marina Lite 4R con Lighthouse, a web-based dashboard that offers remote management and monitoring.

Videodata implemented a flexible and intelligent migration strategy, designed to cause little to no disruption to TV Cultura's operations, seamlessly migrating the broadcaster's Neptune database to the new Marina platform. Additionally, because Neptune playlists can be opened natively in Marina, and both Neptune and Marina can communicate with the same file and NLS in parallel, operators can continue working normally without interruption and with minimal training throughout the migration process.

The facility has two main control rooms, each with two channels and four GV Maestro master switches, GV K2 video servers and a Jupiter router. Marina will also control TV Cultura's ingest workflow, and the system is designed with full redundancy for automation, playout and the database. In addition to offering better integration with the traffic system, this migration will simplify your media management and approval workflows, as well as your web and closed captioning workflows. Additionally, Marina will offer greater flexibility for operators in design creation and provide detailed reports and logs for each device and user.

Gilvani Moletta, director of engineering and technology at TV Cultura, highlights that "TV Cultura has long been recognized as a pioneering broadcaster and we are constantly looking for ways to improve our facilities and workflows with the long term in mind. Our Neptune automation system has served us very well over the last decade, so the next logical step was the upgrade to the latest Marina. Not only is the transition seamless, but we are also confident that the technology is right to help us grow and meet the challenges of the next decade. and beyond.”

With Lighthouse, TV Cultura will extend Marina's functionality to commercial users, operations staff and engineers on and off premises. The web-based interface will provide them with monitoring, media management and system configuration tools, so that status information and corrective actions are just seconds away, even when they are outside the control room.

Marcelo Blum, Director of Systems and Technology at Videodata, points out that "TV Cultura was one of Pebble's first clients in Latin America. It is always a rewarding experience to work with a forward-thinking client over a long period of time and help them evolve and update their technology without any relevant interruption in their workflow."

"Our Marina Lite system is proving popular in Latin America, where it is used to provide playout automation and master control to customers who are upgrading or replacing their first generation platforms. It offers an affordable solution for customers looking for a robust, resilient and sophisticated playlist control system that can grow with their operational needs and budgets. We are delighted that TV Cultura has once again decided to trust Pebble and we look forward to continuing to support its continued growth in the years to come," adds Tom Gittins, commercial director of Pebble Beach Systems.