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// CLIENTCAPITOL TELEVISON

// SECTORGOVERNMENT

// GOALTO INCREASE THE TRANSPARENCY OF LEGIS-LATIVE PROCEEDINGS AND BETTER CONNECT WITH RESIDENTS

“About half of our staff didn’t have any TV ex-perience, but the power and simplicity of the Ross solution made it easy for them to quickly become productive. Now, we can cover up to seven different Assembly proceedings at the same time, and stream them live to the web.”

Derek HayesGeneral Manager, Rhode Island General Assembly’s Capitol Television

// ABOUTRhode Island General Assembly is the state legislature for the U.S. state of Rhode Island. The Assembly is composed of the lower House of Representatives, which has 75 members, and the upper Senate, which has 38 members. The General Assem-bly meets at the Rhode Island State House.

Capitol Television is the television production department of the Rhode Island General Assembly, and is responsible for televis-ing legislative proceedings and broadcasting them to residents of Rhode Island and interested people around the world.

// THE CHALLENGEWith broadcast equipment that was analogue and 20-years old, and a total of nine cameras that had to be manually moved between various committee rooms, staff at Capitol Television found themselves dealing with numerous workflow issues, managing significant inefficiencies and wasting a lot of time. Additionally, they were unable to broadcast more than three different Assembly proceedings at any one time. This meant that, with as many as 12 committees meeting at the same time, much work done by Rhode Island’s Representatives and Senators was invisible to the general public. As well, there were delays between proceedings being taped and being broadcast, meaning viewers could not experience legislative proceedings in real time.

// THE SOLUTIONCapitol Television chose an end-to-end, high-definition video production solution from Ross Video that includes CamBot robotic cameras, NK Series routers, openGear ter-minal equipment, Carbonite production switchers, Black-Storm video servers, XPression motion graphics and the new Legislative Control System (LCS).

“We looked at a number of different vendors, but Ross Video’s demo blew the competition away,” says Derek Hayes, general manager for Rhode Island’s Capitol Television. “We liked the fact that Ross could provide an all-in-one solution that was easy to use and where we had no worries about one piece of equipment “talking” to another. The integrated workflow, the ability to do a split screen and bring in graphics, everything, was so straightforward.”

Ross Video’s LCS has a touchscreen user interface that can be tailored to the specific configuration of any legislature. The Carbonite switchers have all the power needed to switch among the legislative chambers’ different cameras, and pro-duction control is unified into the touchscreen enabling clean, attractive, network-quality production to be created by a sin-gle operator. By integrating with microphones or the delegate system, the best camera angle and relevant graphical overlay are automatically selected and placed on the switcher’s “pre-set” bus. The operator can then trim the camera, if necessary, and “take” the new angle and graphics.

“About half of our staff didn’t have any TV experience, but the power and simplicity of the user interface, the LCS, Dash-Board, XPression and everything else about the Ross solution made it easy for them to be on-board and productive really quickly,” adds Bill Carr, Chief Engineer at Capitol TV. “How-ever, if a seasoned director wants to use the system, it’s easy to switch out of the LCS and run the system manually.”

// THE RESULTCapitol TV can now cover up to seven different Assembly proceedings at the same time and stream them live to the web.

“The Ross solution enables us to create seven live programs, which we stream to cable TV, the Internet and video on demand. This has significantly improved transparency and met our goal of televising more Assembly debates, committee hearings, press conferences and other events,” says Hayes. “We have around 350,000 cable subscribers in the State and have had as many as 80,000 people from around the U.S. watching our live stream of some debates. Also, we went on air on time and on budget. All in all, this has been a big success all round.”

Live production is much more efficient and post-production has been eliminated. The fact that the system can be run by a single opera-tor, if necessary, makes it easier and more cost effective to cover even those long Assembly sittings and committee hearings, during which many people testify, that can sometimes go on until the next morning

“The Ross solution has delivered everything it promised and more,” finishes Hayes. “It’s easy to make changes, the CamBots are brilliant, and the training and customer support were stellar, but we’ve only just started to find out what this solu-tion can do. We can’t wait to explore the solution further, find out more and be more creative. We’re very happy we decided to go with Ross Video.”

// ABOUT THE ROSS VIDEO SOLUTIONCapitol Television chose an end-to-end, high-definition video production solution from Ross Video that includes CamBot robotic cameras, NK Series routers, openGear terminal equipment, Carbonite production switchers, BlackStorm video servers, XPression motion graphics and the new Legislative Control System (LCS).

// THE LEGISLATIVE CONTROL SYSTEM• DashBoard LCS Control Panel: Customized to the pre-

cise needs of each individual legislature.• Carbonite production switcher: Uses the latest tech-

nology to pack unprecedented production power into a compact frame. All models of Carbonite feature a breadth of capabilities that make these switchers unique in their class.

• XPression 3D motion graphics: Designed to meet the demanding requirements of sports TV and live shows, including the Academy Awards, but priced to fit within a legislative budget.

• CamBot robotic cameras: Easy-to-use interface makes setting up a shot as easy as selecting a camera, fram-ing the shot using joysticks and a focus knob, and stor-ing the image through the touchscreen interface.

• User interface: Fully customizable to include artwork and seating plans that are as unique as each individual legislature.

• Live video in the GUI: Latency as low as 33ms (one video frame).

• BlackStorm video servers: An easy-to-use production clip player with a comprehensive production workflow.

• NK Series routers: Comprehensive family of routing solutions that offers a wide variety of matrix sizes and types, flexible control panels and a powerful control system to tie everything together.

• openGear®: Open architecture platform standard that provides the industry with the most flexible and ad-vanced terminal equipment possible.