German parliament The Bundestag Upgrades to VSM System for Parliament TV

Since mentioned in the German general law, that “German parliament sittings are public”, the German Bundestag decided to create a Parliament TV in 1999 to make sittings available to everyone interested. Besides the coverage of the plenary debates additional productions include public committee meetings and hearings, in-house productions on the work of the Bundestag as well as interviews and panel discussions. In the Bundestag facilities Bundestag TV uses one studio plus four adjacent control rooms. All footage is made available as live stream on the website of Bundestag TV broadcasting with 2 channels as well as in a huge archive and media library for past broadcasts. Additional viewing is possible via selected cable networks, satellite and the Bundestag mobile App.

In order to produce in HD-quality the refurbishment included implementation of Imagine Platinum routers as well as Grass Valley X-16 multiviewer systems. VSM is used as the overall control system and has direct access to the routers, vision mixers, multiviewer system (including UMD and Tally), audio mixers plus the LDK gateway. By visualizing all rooms and studios on OCPs operators can now select all rooms in the facility and directly control and access cameras, etc.

All multiviewers can be controlled and managed using VSM’s Storage Groups to create, load and save presets incl. Labels, Crosspoints, GPO states, parameters and panel layouts using the Mimic Button. Further on VSM’s powerful Boxing functionality was implemented for disaster recovery and studio switchover with a single button push e.g. to prepare a show in offline studios available for every other studio. With the Pooling function the automatic insert of processing cards into the signal chain is possible and pools of processing cards can be managed automatically.

With the use of VSM as flexible control system operators now easily can switch between recording rooms, the plenary room, several rooms occupied by certain political parties as well as hearing rooms. Due to VSM powerful feature set and flexibility in daily use operational workflows are simplified and streamlined thus saving time during preparation and production.