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Request for Consulting Services

CPB seeks a consultant or consulting firm to assist in developing an organizational structure for collaborative development of a Joint Master Control, Storage and Asset Management Initiative serving as a centralized digital master control for CPB qualified public television stations. The consultancy is anticipated to last 8 to 12 weeks.

This project will create a central master control (Centralcast) for full master control operation for a subset of the participating stations, and provide for a central hub for others which will provide for centralized ingest, storage, data and media management, and a common merged traffic system.

Central Master Control

Requested matching funds will pay for the installation and commissioning of an Omneon Spectrum server, with approximately 2000 hours of storage, and a near-line spinning disk attached storage of approximately 15,000 hours, all encoded at 25 Mbps. Building on existing Crispin Automation in use, an expanded automation system will accommodate the master control operations of several of the participating stations. Traffic operations will be merged, with traffic personnel from the other stations accessing the database of programming at the NOC facility through the existing interconnect. Standard definition and high definition program streams will be fed back to the participating stations' transmission encoding equipment.

Central Storage Hub

For stations that are not ready for a centralized master control, the hybrid system will provide sufficient playback and record capacity for play out of all their local streams for air, and for contribution to the HUB. Each station will use existing Crispin automation and ProTrack traffic software to allow for a common database of media clips. When these stations feel that they can move their operations into the central hub, the equipment and software purchased will simply be moved and integrated into the central hub master control.