PSSI Provides Last-Minute Solution For Election Coverage

When TF1 France called PSSI Global Services in need of a last-minute replacement for a rooftop flyaway system intended to facilitate coverage of the 2020 U.S. election, PSSI came through with a fast and seamless IP solution.

“Attempting to move a flyaway system into the D.C. area in the 16-hour window of time we had is next to impossible, so I suggested an IP solution to replace the uplink system,” said Tracy Michaels, PSSI’s director of project engineering. “With some quick thinking and the combined resources of PSSI and our partners, we turned a challenging situation into a successful delivery of nearly 18 hours of content for a critical international broadcast.”

After receiving the urgent call, PSSI programmed a set of Nextologies NXT4 appliances with gateway switches and rushed them to FedEx for an early morning delivery. While the equipment was in transit, PSSI built routing in the Nextologies platforms for a primary and backup SDI delivery as well as an ASI multicast TSoIP at 10-20 mbps on a point-to-point route from Washington, D.C. to PSSI International Teleport (PIT). PIT has a robust Nextologies server infrastructure to support multiple SDI signals in and out, as well as multicast feeds.

For TF1 France’s election coverage, the SDI signal was delivered to PIT with a 250 ms latency buffer. From there, the teleport converted the 1080i59.94 signal to a 1080i50 frame rate and pushed it out on the Telstra network to BT Tower for TF1 France to pick up.

PSSI also provided an on-site engineer in Washington, D.C. to manage the equipment and support TF1 France throughout the project. The engineer brought a MediaKind AVP1000 Multiplexer and RX8200 Receiver to facilitate additional capabilities and to act as a potential gateway and quality control point.

“For a last-minute project of this nature, implementing a timely, successful solution requires a tremendous amount of flexibility and resources,” said Matt Bridges, Strategic Television president. “PSSI’s skilled engineering staff and strong partnerships with industry leaders such as Telstra and Nextologies make us the premier transmission solutions provider — in any context, via any platform.”