TV Center (TVC) in Moscow, the state-run TV station with the fourth-largest coverage area in Russia, has embraced IP with Lawo video, networking and control systems.

Owned by the city of Moscow, TVC’s programmes highlight various aspects of Moscow life, aired across the complete Russian territory. In the first phase of a transition to IP technology, TVC has embarked upon a major technical renovation of its central control room and two additional studios. Moscow system integrator DNK was trusted with the implementation of IP video, networking and control technology.

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TVC has undertaken a major technical renovation of its central control room and two additional studios | Credit: DNK

DNK, in co-operation with TVC and Lawo, installed Lawo’s VSM (Virtual Studio Manager) IP broadcast control and workflow solution, as well as the V__matrix software-defined IP core routing, processing and multi-viewing platform. For network supervision, DNK installed Lawo smartDash system monitoring and realtime telemetry for broadcast networks, and smartScope deep packet media inspection and network analyser. A__digital64 units provide abundant I/O connectivity. This installation at TV Center is notable as the first ST-2110 studio installation in Russia.

“An important part of this first phase was to create an IP routing core which could take 40×40 feeds from the existing main SDI router and transfer them to the IP infrastructure using encaps/decaps via six Lawo C100 processing blades,” explained DNK’s CTO Maxim

Krivtsov. “These C100 blades are also dedicated for 4-channel format conversion using vm_udx functionality.”

TV Center’s CTO Alexey Brusnitskiy said: “We decided to transition to IP for our complete infrastructure in order to be ready for the future challenges of TV production and distribution. IP technology offers the highest level of flexibility and efficiency in workflows, and it provides the best possible reliability and security for our productions and our network.”

Krivtsov added: “Working closely with the customer, we conceived a turnkey end-to-end IP transition project including overall control system, SDN orchestration, IP-to/from-SDI gateways, up/down/cross conversion, multiviewer and a network monitoring system. This was only possible with Lawo’s VSM, V__matrix, Smart and A__line interfacing gear.”

After this first phase, all TVC control rooms and studios will be integrated into a complete IP infrastructure step by step, as part of the larger multi-stage project.