Archive Projects
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2004
QVC: Control Room A (Vision, Production, Audio and CTA areas)
Control room A was taken out of service by QVC in 2004 and completely re-built by dB Broadcast. This million pound project included the detailed design, equipment sourcing, prefabrication and installation of the technical facilities. Control Room A comprises a vision area for setting up and monitoring 8 Thomson cameras, a director’s gallery with 9 metre desk and 32 monitor stack, sound control room with a 52 fader Calrec Sigma 100 digital console and 2 equipment areas of 10 racks.
dB Broadcast supplied a 54 input Thomson XtenDD 2.5 M/E mixer, Thomson 64x64 router and Sony monitors. Control rooms A and B provide 17 hours live to air coverage every day.
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2004
BBC: Facilities in Lisbon for Euro2004
dB Broadcast provided the BBC’s temporary facilities in Lisbon for their coverage of the Euro 2004 football championships. dB designed, prefabricated and installed the systems in the studio, control rooms, central apparatus room and edit areas - together with the monitor stacks comprising over 100 monitors, control desks (the largest of which was 9 metres) and technical infrastructure. dB was also responsible for the break down at the end of the competition.
The building became available less than three weeks before the beginning of the tournament, so most of the system was prefabricated and tested in the UK at dB’s purpose-built 16,000 square foot factory, to minimise the amount of work required on-site.
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2004
MTV: TV studio
dB Broadcast built the spectacular new studio at number 1 Leicester Square for MTV Networks UK & Ireland. This is the only major studio in the West End and a valuable addition to London’s media industry. The new glass-walled studio was specially built as the new home of MTV’s daily video chart countdown TRL, which regularly features live interviews and performances from the biggest names in music and entertainment. TRL is MTV’s flagship show in both the UK and the USA, where it is broadcast from New York’s Times Square.
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2004
BBC: Survey vehicles
dB Broadcast won the contract to build two new transmission survey vehicles for BBC Strategy & Distribution. The specialist vehicles are used to measure terrestrial TV and radio reception throughout the UK, including DTT and DAB.
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2004
Indian Parliament: TV coverage
dB Broadcast in partnership with local Indian agent was responsible for the supply, installation and commissioning of a robotically controlled camera system for TV coverage and video recording at the parliament building in Delhi. This included an eight camera system in the auditorium (seating for 1100), a four camera facility in a 190 seat committee room and a four camera mobile system. The Hitachi cameras were controlled using Radamec robotic equipment.
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2003
UPC France: 70 Regional headend systems
A central headend and 70 regional headends were fully prefabricated and tested at dB Broadcast’s factory before being delivered to sites throughout France. Prefabrication enabled each site to be installed and accepted in a matter of days.
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2003
MTV: VTR playout areas
dB Broadcast refurbished 2 VTR playout areas at MTV in London. This included the design of the desks, supply of all equipment, system design and the installation. The rooms were in continuous use therefore the systems were prefabricated at dB’s factory to minimise the on-site time. The installation of VTR Room B took less than 6 days to install, including the stripping out of the old system.
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2002
BBC TV Centre: Freeview
dB designed, prefabricated and installed the heart of the BBC Freeview system, which included Philips encoding and compression equipment. Also, the monitoring system was based around dB’s Hawkeye range of monitoring modules. And, dB did it all in record breaking time: only six weeks from order to completion, using a team of 15 wiring technicians and supervisors.
Because of the short timescale, and the vast amount of other work going on at BBC Television Centre, fifteen racks of equipment were prefabricated at dB’s purpose-built 16,000 square foot factory. These were fully wired, fitted with equipment and tested in just two and a half weeks. This enabled factory acceptance by BBC Technology Professional Solutions to be carried out. -
2002
BBC Maida Vale: Studio 1
Studio one is the largest studio at Maida Vale and home of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and is used extensively for performances and recordings of large scale classical music. The studio can accommodate more than 150 musicians, a choir of over 100 and an audience of 220. dB refurbished and re-equipped the control room and apparatus room using a Studer D950 and installed new fibre optic circuits for the mic amps which were mounted in the studio. New tie-lines and communications circuits were run to various adjacent areas.
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2002
Teletrax: Monitoring systems
Teletrax digitally embeds an invisible and indelible code in video which, when broadcast, is automatically tracked through a worldwide network of systems prefabricated by dB Broadcast and installed by Teletrax. Ultimately, it reports the video usage to producers, broadcasters and distributors enabling them to determine precise use of the video and to control and realise the full value of their copyrighted material. dB Broadcast custom designed and supplied a quantity of tuning units.
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2002
QVC: Control Room B
dB Broadcast were responsible for the detailed design, prefabrication and installation of the video and control systems within a new Control Room at QVC. This Control Room was designed so that in the event of a disaster with the main control room, QVC could move into it instantly and resume television broadcasting. The system included 3 desks with associated monitor stacks and a video equipment area comprising 8 racks.
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2002
BBC: Commonwealth Games, Manchester
dB Broadcast won two contracts with BBC Technology for the Commonwealth Games for which the BBC was the host broadcaster. The first contract was for the hire and installation of ancillary vision and audio systems at the 76 square metre integrated International Broadcast Centre. The contract included three control desks, three stacks, 17 VTRs, 80 monitors and large quantities of DAs and converters. 75km of cable was required to link all the areas at the Centre and the 12 Client Rights Holders. All cabling was installed by dB’s own in-house wiring team. The second contract was for the provision and installation of the vision, audio and communications systems for the twelve Technical Operations Centres around Manchester.
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2001
BBC Wales: Control Room C2
dB Broadcast was responsible for the refurbishment of BBC Cardiff’s TV studio C2. This included the supply, design, installation and commissioning of new video and audio control rooms, VAR and studio cabling. dB supplied a 10m video control desk and other custom furniture. Equipment included a Sony vision mixer, Questech DVE, Telex talkback system and Pro-bel router that interfaced to the existing news automation system and the BBC’s BNCS system. The system was fully prefabricated at dB Broadcast’s premises to minimise disruption on-site.
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2001
BBC TV Centre and Nations: Statmux
dB Broadcast installed the Philips StatMux and related equipment at 4 different sites throughout the UK involving the supply of 9 equipment racks and the relocation of equipment in 18 other racks. This was done while services were on-air, requiring careful planning and considerable out of hours working: much of which was carried out overnight.
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2001
Telekabel, Austria & UPC, Norway: Cable headends
dB Broadcast completed 2 cable headends installing equipment from Philips, Motorola, Seachange and others. 100 equipment racks were prefabricated and installed over a 7 month period. -
2000
Meridian: Edit suites
dB Broadcast built two Avid edit suites with a common server for ITV Meridian Broadcasting to enable the station to cover the BT Global Challenge - the world’s toughest yacht race. The race was particularly relevant for Meridian because both it and BT Global Challenge were headquartered in Southampton. The contract also included a voice-over booth and DigitalBetacam VTR room. -
2000
Westminster: Parliamentary Building
dB Broadcast won the prestigious contract to design, build and commission the serial digital broadcast television facilities in Portcullis House, the new Parliamentary offices. Portcullis House accommodates MP’s offices and six meeting rooms equipped for television coverage. Four of the meeting rooms are used solely by select committees, which exist to examine legislation and witnesses. The other two are also used by select committees but have been designed as multi-purpose conference rooms. Proceedings of select committees are televised for live broadcasts, and taped for recorded broadcasts and archives.
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2000
National Cancer Centre: Viewing Room
dB Broadcast built a special television viewing and control room for The Pelican Centre: a new, national surgical centre for pelvic cancer located at the North Hampshire Hospital, Basingstoke. The viewing room is connected by fibre optics to the cancer operating theatre 400m away and allows visiting surgeons to be in two-way audio communication with the operating surgeon and watch pioneering surgery. All operations can be recorded. The viewing room can be used by a presenter and includes a custom control desk, video and audio mixers, a presenter microphone, a roving microphone for visiting surgeons, a rostrum camera, microscopes with a camera, a slide projector with video output and a pathology slide viewer.
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2000
UPC, The Netherlands: Cable headend
dB Broadcast carried out the cabling of the Philips encoding multiplex equipment for a new national headend in Amsterdam. This headend encodes and multiplexes local analogue and digital services and receives all regionally encoded services. These services are scrambled and re-multiplexed and the output transport streams are then distributed to regional headends. dB installed 66 racks, 50 jackfields and more than 20km of video cable in only 6 weeks. The on-site installation time was kept to a minimum due to extensive prefabrication work at dB Broadcast. dB supplied a large number of Hawkeye modules for the monitoring of ASI and SDV signals.
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1999
Crown Castle: DTT
dB Broadcast was awarded two major contracts from Crown Castle UK (now Arqiva Services) worth several million pounds over a period of two years. The first was for design, manufacture, installation and on-site commissioning of the transmitter input equipment (TIE) systems for Crown Castle’s multiplexes, which included over 400 bays of equipment at 81 sites throughout the UK. The second contract was to develop the digital terrestrial television (DTT) TIE system controller software. The DTT TIE system controller lies at the heart of the broadcast transmission system. Its main purpose is to monitor the status of the equipment required to transmit a single multiplex DTT service and to carry out executive action in response to abnormal conditions.
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1999
BBC Nottingham: Regional TV studio & newsroom
dB Broadcast was the main contractor for the design, manufacture, installation and overall commissioning of the BBC’s new bi-media headquarters in Nottingham. The new building included a 3 camera TV studio, production gallery, CTA, graphics area, 3 edit suites, subtitling area, media hub, bi-media library, roof camera, off-air receiver room and main transmission room.