The delivery of a 16 UHD-camera OB van to St. Petersburg broadcasting company City TV-Radio Agency JSC marks further success for Broadcast Solutions and brings innovative tech to Russia. The OB is one of the first and largest UHD OB vans in the country and will serve the city’s own channel “St. Petersburg” to produce large cultural or social events.
For a lot of the events, City TV-Radio Agency JSC will produce international feeds or federal coverage to be broadcast to the whole Russian country. St. Petersburg City TV-Radio agency works with various technology providers reaching production capacities of up to 5 large OB vans. With the new OB van, named “Neva”, the company is even more flexible and of course, can now produce in UHD.
As the main broadcaster of multi-million metropolis St. Petersburg, City TV-Radio Agency is responsible for TV-productions of events taking place in the city like the celebration of Day of the City or Navy Day, concerts as well as political and cultural events.
Ilya Osichev, CTO at City TV-Radio Agency JSC, comments on the new OB and the building process together with Broadcast Solutions: “Our company and our team have a lot of experience in large and complex live productions and a deep understanding of workflows and processes inside an OB van. From the starting point, we had a strong opinion and a lot of expectations, and we strongly believed that only a very experienced company could match our requirements for building a new OB van. And of course, UHD is still a pretty special format currently.”
The OB van comes as a full trailer with two extensions and offers 20 workplaces. The OB van’s infrastructure and signal workflow is designed for having signals coming in from external inputs through fibre or Telco lines from different locations in St. Petersburg to join the main cameras. Also, additional outputs are designed to feed large LED screens with the program produced by a second vision mixer panel. City TV-Radio Agency and Broadcast Solutions trusted in Grass Valleys UHD-native LDX86N cameras, Grass Valley Sirius router and Kahuna vision mixer. Besides Riedel Artist Intercom and IHSE KVM solutions, the OB van is equipped with a Calrec Summa audio console and audio matrix. With the use of hi human interface in the OB van, Broadcast Solutions adds a further OB van to their hi rooster and widens the market share for its home-breed control system.
With the hi human interface control system, Broadcast Solutions follows an entirely new road in the development and overall design of control tools for broadcast and media. With innovative configuration concepts and drag-drop functionalities, hi is the basis to simplify operation and control of all relevant video and audio technology within the OB truck, including router, audio and video mixer, multiviewer, Tally and signal management.
Delivered in September 2020 “Neva” is already producing its first events in St. Petersburg.