NOVEMBER 3, 2008 -- Polatis Inc. (search for Polatis), supplier of optical switch technologies, today announced that its Trinity family of optical video routing switches have been used by global broadcast leader CBS to bring live feeds from The White House.
The CBS Washington D.C. Bureau is using the Trinity optical switch to connect camera sources within The White House via leased fiber lines. This allows CBS to remotely select camera positions and route them back to the Washington D.C. Bureau, a task that would have previously required a team of engineers manually linking cameras with patch cords based on the day's shooting schedule, say Polatis representatives.
"This is a truly prestigious deployment of our Trinity optical switch products and one of which we are extremely proud," reports Nick Parsons, vice president of product development at Polatis. "This contract with the CBS Washington D.C. Bureau reinforces the capability of Trinity to provide highly reliable, quality signal switching in an environment where performance is of the utmost importance and downtime or signal loss can be disastrous for an international broadcaster."
"As well as receiving a secure, highly reliable routing capability, CBS has also been able to take advantage of reduced man-power costs and time, and a 6-dB saving in optical budget due to the elimination of the patch panel and high-loss connectors," notes Parsons.
The Trinity series is designed specifically for the video transport and broadcast market. It supports virtually all protocols and feed rates--AES, SMPTE-276M, 259M, and 292M, ASI/DVB, NTSC, PAL, QAM, and others.
Underpinning the Trinity design is Polatis' beam-steering technology. Unlike other photonic offerings, Trinity can establish and maintain connection routes without a signal present, in a pre-provisioned 'ready and waiting state,' says the company. Not relying on an optical signal feedback to maintain the connection also means no modulation is introduced to the signal, a feature valued by customers who use Polatis products for RF-over-fiber applications today. Like all Polatis products, traffic can be bi-directional and carry single or multiple wavelengths.
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