Cambridge, UK, Andover, MA., – September 23, 2008 – Polatis Inc., a supplier of high performance optical switch technologies, has 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 DC Bureau has utilised the Trinity optical switch to connect camera sources within The White House via leased fibres. This allows CBS to remotely select camera positions and route them back to the Washington DC 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.
“This is a truly prestigious deployment of our Trinity optical switch products and one of which we are extremely proud,” said Sean Gordon, Director of Sales, Video Products, at Polatis. “This contract with the CBS Washington DC 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 6dB saving in optical budget due to the elimination of the patch panel and high-loss connectors.”
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. Under-pinning the Trinity design is Polatis’ unique beam-steering technology. Unlike other photonic solutions, Trinity can establish and maintain connection routes without a signal present, in a pre-provisioned ‘ready and waiting state’. 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.
