Avocent AMX5010 Brochure

Volltreffer as the viewers see it:
presenter Max Schmiedl (standing at
the desk on the left) with his studio
guests. Meanwhile, an entire data
centre is working away behind the
scenes of ATVplus' football show.
Erwin Keil, specialist for TV
production technology, demonstrates
how, from the control room,
producers can access all computers
required for producing a TV show.
The Data Director: The Avocent
AMX5010 KVM switch captures all
user entries made by the production
team and relays them to the
connected computers.
Case Study
Football Show Hits the Mark
Thanks to New Data Centre
Vienna. October 2004. The thought of a Saturday evening with no football
on the box is unimaginable for millions of fans. And a football show with
technical problems is inconceivable for producers and directors. A single
90-minute sports programme can contain dozens of match reports,
interviews, graphics and live studio discussions. But what football fans
never get to see is the data centre working away behind the scenes
between the opening and final credits.
ATVplus, Austria's only commercial national broadcaster, has been televising
the country's Bundesliga matches since the current season started. Fans meet
up regularly at ATVplus on the football show Volltreffer ("Back of the Net!"),
for which a brand new studio was built just a few months ago.
When Max Schmiedl, presenter of Volltreffer, and his team go on air, they
place their complete trust in the first class technology solution supplied to
ACT-Media Produktionsservice-GmbH by the Vienna-based system vendor
AMEC Medientechnik Vertriebs-GmbH.
Some 44 servers provide all of the information required both on and off
camera: from video servers providing reports from the football stadiums, to
character generators which create captions displayed at the bottom of the TV
screen and autocues providing the presenters with their scripts. All of this is
backed up by a host of other computers that work in the background to
provide additional facilities for the show.
To make sure Volltreffer is always on target, 16 staffers work behind the
scenes on high-performance computers. They assess and edit incoming
reports in the short space between the final whistle and the start of the show,
and deliver them to the control room.
The control room is the studio's nerve centre, where decisions are made
about which report goes on air and which of the studio cameras will transmit
images to the viewers at home. Every Saturday the show features 11 pre-
recorded segments, one live link, statistics containing graphics after each of
the five match reports, and countless other types of text segments, all of
which must be displayed on cue.
At the heart of all this behind the scenes work is a single piece of
sophisticated equipment. It controls who does what on the production
computers. Known as a KVM switch, this piece of hardware is the interface
between operators and the computer technology. The importance of this
switch interface is emphasised by Erwin Keil, managing director of AMEC
Medientechnik, who explains that all of the essential systems in the video
network depend on this single piece of equipment. The switch captures the
signals from the keyboard, video and mouse (hence the acronym KVM) of
each operator workstation and relays them to the relevant server. This allows
technical staff to work as if they were accessing the computer directly –