Thai TV5, one of Thailand’s longest established free-to-air television broadcasters, has chosen a PlayBox Neo playout system to replace legacy equipment at its studio headquarters in Bangkok. The project was supervised by PlayBox Neo partner PS & Sons (Thailand) Co Ltd, based in the same city, and includes fully integrated eMAM.

Now in its 64th year of operation, Thai TV5 is owned and managed by the Royal Thai Army. It broadcasts news and variety programs in 1080i high definition across Thailand’s digital terrestrial network via direct-to-home satellite.

“Thai TV5’s legacy third-party system had become impractical and costly to maintain,” comments David Srikalra, Managing Director at PS & Sons. “We recommended PlayBox Neo on the basis of its successful operation at many broadcast networks and playout facility companies around the world. PlayBox Neo’s Channel-in-a-Box approach is a very logical system to install and integrates easily with third party devices. The PlayBox Neo solution we proposed and commissioned is inherently space-efficient and can be expanded whenever required to accommodate additional channels or greater production flexibility. The user interface itself is highly intuitive, easy to learn and designed to remain eye-friendly during long working sessions thanks to its low-glare background. PlayBox Neo also offers excellent support from initial planning, system integration and staff training through each system’s proven long working life.”

“We are very gratified to have been chosen as a partner in this very high profile project,” says Nut Deesamer, Director of PlayBox Neo’s Thailand branch. “David Srikalra and his colleagues together with the Thai TV5 operations team specified the features and facilities they needed to allow the network to function with high efficiency and flexibility. The solution we recommended and delivered includes three Neo-20 Channel-In-a-Box playout servers based on our latest AirBox Neo-20 architecture, with built in automated content and playlist transfer tools plus two Capture Suites, all under control from our new Multi Playout Manager. They are deployed in the main control room used by the HD channel.”

“As Thai TV5 is one of Thailand’s highest-profile broadcasters, the system is configured to function as main and backup with the additional protection of a cool spare,” adds PlayBox Neo Asia Pacific General Manager Desmon Goh. “Our servers and software are closely integrated with eMAM from initial ingest, quality control, graphics and scheduling, right through to pre-transmission storage.”

“The media asset management solution chosen for Thai TV is based on our eMAM Enterprise platform,” details EMAM, Inc. VP of Business Development Chuck Buelow. “eMAM gives operators the tools they need to locate and preview content managed from an unlimited number of locations including local storage, cloud storage and archive systems.”

eMAM Enterprise scales the complete eMAM Workflow system to meet the needs of the largest organizations for redundancy and scale. In this solution, eMAM Enterprise ran on five or more servers to support 50 active defined users, but the package can actually scale to user counts in the thousands, all maintained through LDAP/Active Directory. Editors and designers can use panels inside Adobe Creative Cloud apps (Premiere, After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign) or an extension inside Apple Final Cut to access all eMAM’s tools designed to manage media, and collaborate seamlessly with eMAM web users.

An automated streaming and broadcast playout system based on 22 years of refinement, AirBox Neo-20 makes TV content creation and management easy and stress-free. Available in 1U Channel-in-a-Box and 3U multichannel versions, it allows playlist scheduling to be performed weeks ahead of actual transmission.

Capture Suite is designed to speed up the ingest workflow of television networks, post-production facilities and playout service-providers. Operators gain the ability to control multiple ingest channels across multiple servers. Functions such as input selection, ingest presets, file-naming conventions, assignments and auto-transfer can be performed quickly and easily.

PlayBox Neo Multi Playout Manager (MPM) allows multiple AirBox Neo-20 channels to be operated via IP remotely from any place in the world, home, distant office or any network-connected location. Control features accessible within MPM include on-the-fly playlist changes, manual triggering of events, user-configurable presets for pushbutton access to logos, IP router control and subsidiary tools such as graphics/text control.