Teletext TV
The client's requirement was to be able to monitor all of the Teletext signals live and simultaneously on multiple television channels both analogue and digital.
Consumer and commercial hunger for more and more information placed increased demands on Teletext. Speed and accuracy of creation and delivery were key to satisfying those demands for which a new generation of technologies was required.
Teletext needed to view the information they created via their existing structured cable system with a minimum of equipment at the operator workstations.
Use of the structured cable system meant that changes in floor layouts, workgroups and desk locations could easily be accommodated without the need for any additional cabling. It was desirable to have a system that was intelligent and could provide restricted access to services by user or location and also report on the actual system usage for billing purposes.
In order to meet this requirement, IVC Media designed a system using the Cabletime MediaStar Pro television delivery system.
Receivers and signal processors for all required services, including user dedicated digital receivers for selected groups and users, were centrally located within equipment cabinets in apparatus rooms on the buildings' two main floors.
All signal feeds from satellite and terrestrial sources were fed to these rooms where they were distributed to the receivers via cross connection panels for flexibility.
The two apparatus rooms effectively provided two separate television headends, each capable of operating independently and providing up to 70 channels each. The signals from both of these headends were then distributed to MediaStar Pro hubs on both floors providing a flexible and highly resilient solution.
The hubs were allocated to serve a mixture of digital interactive users and static analogue users.
MediaStar control software was used to assign the correct viewing rights for all hub ports and control access to interactive services.
The MediaStar system technology sends unmodified baseband video from the receiver or signal converter directly to the receiving equipment. This allows the use of standard teletext decoders for the analogue text services.
Digital interactive text services were provided using the system capability to extend the infrared controls from the user via the structured cabling and MediaStar system direct to the receivers. The effect of this has minimised the equipment and cabling required at the operator positions and has left them fully flexible to cross patching for location changes.
