Nebraska Public Media Relies on Imagine to Integrate Expanding Operations

LINCOLN, Neb. —Starting out with a single over-the-air channel in 1954, Nebraska Public Media has been providing news, education, entertainment and sports programming for the last 70 years.

We now support five live-to-air TV channels, two radio channels and online resources. In addition to producing live community and news programs, we broadcast programming from PBS and NPR on TV, radio, online, social media and mobile apps. We transitioned into streaming when we began broadcasting live gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Nebraska Legislature.

The Emergency Alert System is also a huge portion of what we do, and as the State Emergency Communications Committee Chair for Nebraska, I help with a lot of EAS activities. In addition, we serve as the backup for the PBS Diverse Disaster Maintenance System, which means we cover the entire country with PBS signals when serious weather hits the East Coast.

It’s a lot to manage, and I have spent the last 29 years helping the station connect its local communities to the world and each other.

Automating Master Control
As network operations manager, it’s my job to keep everything on air, and I’ve been working with Imagine Communications products since 2000 to ensure our master control infrastructure meets our changing needs.

We use Imagine’s Versio integrated playout engines for channel origination, four Nexio+ AMP servers for record and quality control, Nexio Motion for media asset management, and ADC automation for content control and delivery. The Versio offline Creation Station enables us to quickly create a snipe or a crawl for sports or for EAS alerts. In addition, we use Selenio encoders for transcoding, which enables us to operate 12 live streaming channels and create VOD files for PBS Passport delivery.

Imagine ties everything together, and everything is interoperable. The Nexio Motion software moves files around our facility, including to Avid editing stations and to the web, making our file-based workflow perform efficiently.  In total, we have 91 workflows built in the Motion system to shuffle files around in our facility.

All of our signals go to air through the Versio platform, with each of our five channels split between two ADC Air Clients, which let us monitor and control multiple playout and ingest channels from a single UI. Our operators are very comfortable with this setup, as we have been using ADC for years, and the Versio is mostly hands off.

Automating our workflow helps simplify all our on-air operations, and the fact that our operators don’t have to touch it illustrates the reliability of the Air Client and how well it works. The playlist is everything, and the Versio platforms just run and run.

Managing Growth
As time goes on, our services keep developing, and Imagine products enable us to grow alongside them.For example, our tie-in with the Nebraska Legislature requires a big commitment to record facilities, and we recently upgraded our Nexio servers to provide the capacity for 16 HD record channels. Next year we’ll add English and Spanish captioning to the Legislature—for each floor debate as well as all its hearing rooms—which we are obliged to copy for the public archives.

Finally, like most of our broadcast peers, we are starting to plan for the inevitable transition to IP, and we know that Imagine gateway products enable a hybrid environment and gradual migration to ST 2110.

Al Krause is network operations manager at Nebraska Public Media. He can be reached at akrause@nebraskapublicmedia.org .

More information is available at https://imaginecommunications.com .