Custom Consoles announces a new addition to its range of technical control furniture. Developed in response to the coronavirus pandemic, the Operator Safety Screen reduces the risk of airborne infection or direct physical contact between control room personnel without restricting their forward or side view of video monitor displays.

Custom Consoles announces the completion of control room desks and multiscreen monitor display mounts for the London studios of one of the world's largest news agencies. The desks were provided in partnership with broadcast system integrator ATG Danmon.

"Control room furniture is an important part of every major contract," comments ATG Danmon Managing Director Russell Peirson-Hagger. "Bespoke designs tend to be expensive and require very detailed specification. We commissioned all four desks by selecting optimal elements from Custom Consoles' established Module-R series. Our clients appreciate the robust build quality, excellent ergonomics and timeless styling of Module-R. The Module-R range is also well thought out in terms of cable ducting, equipment access and ventilation."

Cobalt Iron Inc., a leading provider of SaaS-based enterprise data protection, today introduced new multitenancy capabilities for the virtual tape library (VTL) ingest feature of Compass, the company's enterprise SaaS backup system. These new capabilities make Compass the first enterprise SaaS backup solution to provide multitenancy at tape ingest, enabling robust and secure sharing and segregation of VTL backups in complex customer and managed service provider (MSP) environments.

Cobalt Iron Inc., a leading provider of SaaS-based enterprise data protection, today announced that IT solutions integrator Sirius Computer Solutions, Inc. (Sirius) is the latest company to join its IronClad Partner Advantage (IPA) program. Sirius will resell Cobalt Iron's Compass™ enterprise SaaS backup platform to clients throughout North America who rely on the company to help them overcome the complexity of data protection.

"We're so pleased to be working with Sirius, a top industry consultant that advises customers on choosing the best technology solution based on their environment, requirements, and IT goals," said Rodney Foreman, chief revenue officer, Cobalt Iron. "Compass fills a need for Sirius and its customers by providing a SaaS-based, automated, modern data protection solution."

Custom Consoles announces the completion of two studio control desks and MediaWall monitor displays for a new UHD production facility at the London headquarters of Fidelity International. Supervised by systems integration specialist ATG Danmon, the project formed part of Fidelity's relocation to new premises in the centre of the city's financial district. The studios will be used for a range of applications including participation in finance-related broadcasts.

"We recommended Module-R and MediaWall on the basis of long experience with both product ranges," comments ATG Danmon Managing Director Russell Peirson-Hagger. "Their inherent modularity allowed us to specify exactly the required parameters in the full knowledge that the results would be robustly built, ergonomically sound, attractively styled, accurately sized and easy to install."

Largest of the two desks is a six metre wide in-line unit positioned along the main wall of the Studio 1 production gallery. This is configured for use by up to six operators including camera shading, robotic camera control, lighting control, graphic effects, vision mixing and control room to studio talkback. Sloping 3U high equipment pods run almost the entire width of this desk. All equipment above and below the main worktop remains easily accessible.

Rise, the membership group for gender diversity within the broadcast technology sector today announced the pairing up of mentees and mentors for its third annual mentoring scheme in the UK, and its first mentoring scheme in the APAC region.

The 2020 programme sees a variety of experienced broadcast sector industry leaders, at a diversity of levels of seniority, ready to offer expertise, knowledge and guidance to 30 women.

The scheme is made possible due the support from industry partners including:

• Gold sponsors – Avid | Sky

• Silver sponsors – Clear-Com | Audio-Technica Europe | Ross Video | Sony | DPP | Pixelogic

This year, Sports Video Group (SVG) Europe Women, a powerful network of women working in the sports media arena made up of members from across TV sports broadcasting, production, distribution and technology, joins as an industry partner. The initiative is supporting two women in the programme. SVG Europe Women will offer those women specific sports industry advice, sessions, events and additional guidance.

UK conversion specialist InSync Technology Ltd has been honoured with a Queen's Award for Enterprise for International Trade.

InSync Technology Ltd is one of 220 organisations nationally to be recognised with a prestigious Queen's Award for Enterprise. Announced 21 April, InSync has been confirmed as a UK leader for its excellence in international trade, with key exports including UHD standards and format conversion products such as MCC-4K and IF4K-DNC.

Employing 27 people, InSync Technology Ltd was set up in 2003 and became employee owned in 2013. InSync is a specialist in all forms of video conversion, including motion compensated frame rate conversion, which is an essential component of every international broadcast chain.

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Rise, the membership organisation for for gender diversity within the broadcast technology sector, is proud to announce that its originally UK based organisation, will also launch in North America and APAC. In addition to the exciting news about global expansion, Rise has appointed four new board members as it seeks to increase its important work throughout the media and entertainment sectors.

Serena Harris, North American Sales Director at Annex Pro, will be running Rise North America. Serena, who is based in Vancouver, has over two decades of experience in the media and entertainment industry and worked with Avid and Marquis.

“I am overjoyed to be launching Rise North America. What Rise is doing for women in the industry is extraordinary and I want to open those same opportunities to women here,” Serena explains. “I am very much looking forward to building on the momentum of Rise’s success’ to help even more women realize their potential and growth within our industry.”

Nancy Diaz Curiel, Managing Director of Digigram Asia will be running Rise APAC. Nancy, who is based in Singapore has over 10 years of experience in the broadcast industry and will be launching a Rise mentoring scheme in the region shortly.

“I am humbled to be appointed head of the APAC antenna of the organization,” says Nancy, “I am a strong believer in gender equality and am an active participant in several mentoring initiatives in the APAC region to highlight and drive the success of the amazing women in our industry.”

Custom Consoles has completed a twin-desk project for the Geneva offices of a globally active service organisation. Designed and supplied in partnership with Swiss broadcast systems integrator Visuals, the desks comprise an L-shaped Module-R for use by up to five production gallery operators and a rectangular Module-R Lite configured for two operators.

"The desks form a core part of a new television studio," says Peter Sullivan, Visuals' Broadcast Systems Project Manager. "These will be used for a wide range of productions which can be live streamed or recorded for later viewing."

"Custom Consoles' Module-R and Module-R Lite series have proved a successful choice in earlier projects we have completed for major broadcasters such as RTS and more recently for Switzerland's National Equestrian Institute, allowing robust and operator-friendly desks to be produced from our initial draft designs."

"The L-shaped Module-R desk is a seven-bay straight section combined with a four-bay and twin-bay corner unit situated alongside a soundproofed window into the studio. A camera control unit embedded in the corner desk surface is used to control multiple robotic cameras."

"To the CCU operator's left is a ColourSource console which controls the studio's LED-illuminated cyclorama.

Cobalt Iron Inc., today announced the extension for its Compass™ enterprise SaaS backup platform that offers advanced protection for network-attached storage (NAS) data. Compass delivers the industry's most efficient and comprehensive approach to NAS backup and recovery via a powerful proxy capability called the Compass NAS Agent.

"In today's enterprises, tremendous amounts of business-critical data are held in NAS systems. The amount of stored NAS data and the urgency to protect it is constantly growing; however, NAS backup and recovery techniques haven't improved much over the years," said Greg Tevis, vice president of Global Strategy at Cobalt Iron. "Compared to traditional NAS schemes such as NDMP, which can be operationally challenging and often results in massive amounts of data being stored for backups, our NAS data protection extension offers a new and modern approach. Using the Compass NAS Agent, Compass is a faster, more efficient, and easier-to-manage solution for backing up billions of files and providing unified protection of critical NAS data."

Sinclair Broadcast Group, one of the largest television broadcast companies in America, is deploying Marquis Broadcast’s Analysis Parking software with a new enterprise monitoring dashboard for its many facilities across the United States. During its expansion, Sinclair Broadcast Group has always focused on optimising best practices for its news technology and operations. Part of this focus was to streamline and simplify the management and monitoring of multiple Avid NEXIS^® systems, helping users manage Avid projects and valuable storage space more efficiently.

Sinclair Broadcast initially deployed Marquis Broadcast’s Analysis Parking in three major sites. The software understands the relationships between Avid projects, folders, bins and media, and runs automated Avid NEXIS analytics and visualization processes, enabling each station to maximise the use of space on their Avid NEXIS storage systems.

Paul Spinelli, director of engineering at Sinclair Broadcast Group, explains: “As a group, we’re continually evaluating new technologies that can realise further operational benefits and efficiencies. Our goal is to standardise technologies and workflows across all our Avid news operations, which now total over 60 sites. The new systems enable the recovery of large amounts of blocked-out – but usable – space and offers detailed enterprise-wide analytics on our Avid storage.”

VITEC, a worldwide leader in advanced video encoding and streaming solutions, today announced it has launched an early adopter program for its enterprise customers to deploy and test its latest radical innovation, EZ TV Player Lite™. The new EZ TV Player Lite HTML5 browser-based player is a central component of the company's award-winning EZ TV IPTV & Digital Signage Platform, serving more than a million users in the corporate, government, military, and sports venue sectors.

HTML5 has become the technology of choice in the enterprise video industry, despite significant compromises in infrastructure costs, latency, and duplication of video streams due to the absence of multicast video support. VITEC's latest patent-pending technology uniquely enables multicast delivery of live and recorded video streams, all the way to enterprise users' computers, without going through multi-unicast distribution servers. The innovative EZ TV Player Lite solution is an intuitive HTML5 application that enables organizations to scale live multicast video services to any size user base without the major costs associated with traditional on-premise transcoding equipment, CDN subscriptions, and costly seat-licenses that result in compromised network bandwidth utilization.

Custom Consoles announces the completion and installation of eight control desks and a large MediaWall monitor display support system for NEP Media Solutions BV. Located in the master control room at the company's studios in Hilversum's Media Park, the desks are configured in front and rear rows for use by up to six and four operators respectively.

"The desks are similar in style and colour scheme to a suite we produced in early 2018 for another NEP television studio facility," says Custom Consoles' Sales Manager Gary Fuller. "The forward desk centres on a dual-operator bridge with a total of eight forward-sloping 4U equipment pods. This is constructed as a rectangular unit with space for two operators. Left and right of the bridge are two units of identical design to the bridge but angled to match the curve of the 13.9 metre wide six-frame MediaWall."

"The MediaWall itself is one of the largest we have produced to date, each of the six frames accommodating four 55 inch UHD displays to create an 11-wide by two-high screen array with two additional pairs of 32 inch screens positioned to form vertical columns immediately left and right of the front-centre bridge desk. The result is a very elegant solution which can justifiably be termed state-of-the-art."

Cobalt Iron Inc., a leading provider of SaaS-based enterprise data protection, today announced IronClad Partner Advantage (IPA), an all-new program for Cobalt Iron channel partners. IPA offers the data protection industry's most innovative partner program, creating a complete business ecosystem to help value-added resellers (VARs), value-added distributors (VADs), global systems integrators (GSIs), and managed service providers (MSPs) build pipeline and maintain market share.

"With IPA, we're empowering our partners to compete in the multicloud, next-generation data protection world by offering support through their customers' entire journey," said Rodney Foreman, chief revenue officer, Cobalt Iron. "That means everything from providing sales leads to backing our partners with marketing experience and providing training with advanced, proven sales techniques. IPA is the most lucrative and rewarding partner program in the industry, and it's backed by a proven sales team with laser-light focus on supporting VARs, VADs, GSIs, and MSPs."