Automate and Manage Your Educational Cable Channel

Schools districts with Educational television (ETV) or Instructional television (ITV) usually operate on a very small budget and staff but are tasked to do much more than typical call letter stations that have more personnel. How does your station activity compare to this typical list of requirements:

• Maintain a 24/7 broadcast schedule of programming on one or more channels.
• Provide relevant educational programming for teachers, parents and students.
• Manage copyright and maintain up-to-date content.
• Provide live programming services such as televising School Board Meetings, sporting events and graduation cremonies.
• Package these programs and schedule for delayed and repeat broadcast.
• Maintain a digital signage system or provide a channel bulletin board to broadcast information about meeting dates and times, schedules, activities, announcements, emergencies and other important events.
• Create original content by working with teachers and other presentors to create content for special occassions or regular lesson plan content that can be used for specific grade levels.
• Provide video on demand services for video in the classroom.
• Duplicate content for teachers.
• Respond to school requests for programming or the delivery of programming.

If your ETV station is respnsible for more than one of the above activities and you need a better way to manage these actitivies or improve workflow or your district is requesting more services without offering addtional money or people perhaps we can help.

Synergy Broadcast's video playback and broadcast automation solution provides a cost-effective and feature-rich solution to help manage educational televsision stations. Our systems are perfect for single channel operations but also scale up for multi-channel facilities and provide a migration path for future growth.

Broadcast Automation Software

The key to reducing manhours and workflow begins with the right broadcast automation software. The purpose of broadcast automation software is to reduce scheduling complexities, speed up the process of scheduling and reduce on-air errors so your station is easier to maintain and operate while on the air 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. Learn more about now VLM, our station automation software can help you improve station management or reduce costs.

Digital Video Servers

Tape is gone and stations that have not moved from the old "device control" model that uses VCR's and DVD players need to move to a Digital Video Server to improve workflow and begin to reduce operating cost or improve operations regardless of what type of signal your cable company requires. If your cable company needs and analog signal, SDI or HD-SDI you need to make the switch to a digital server. By combining the automation capabilities that come with a digital video server and broadcast automation software you put your station in a position to accomplish both short-term and long-term goals.

Information Delivery

Your ETV station can be the primary source of information for your school district or just a television station. If you want to ensure relevancy within the district in the digital age, then focus on expanding your mission to include accurate, up-to-date and relevant information delivery to your cable viewers but also to every school in the district by providing both programming and information. The key to success is to incorporate a turnkey digital signage/channel graphics system that enables you integrate important information within your programming schedule. Our Informa integration provides the ability to not only schedule specific announcements and updates but you can also push the daily tasks of updating this information to others in the district thus reducing your labor requirement while improving outcomes. 

Live Meetings on Cable and On Line

Live meetings can be very simple and just need a router switch to go live or become much more complicated because the School Board Room is located in another building, several hundred yards or miles away from your station so you have to be in two places at once to make everything happen. If you have VLM automation software, we've got you covered. Use our Studio Switch or Remote Access to trigger changes from one location when you are in another. Don't panic because the meeting is starting late or endind early or going over time because VLM provides you with tools to manage all of these issues. You can trigger "on time" or manually and you can prepare for extended meetings with our "join in progress" feature or easily deal with short meetings with our "automatic default" to CG feature so when you return control to the Automation System it provides a smooth transition.

Does the School Board want you to stream the meeting during the broadcast to reach the largest possible audience? No problem. We can provide a complete "live streaming" option to make your job easier plus you can capture the meeting in multiple file formats for later rebroadcast and video on demand usage.