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| Montgomery County Goes Live |
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June 9, 2010
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In any county, there’s a need to serve
the public with information on the
activities of the local government.
by Bob Kovacs
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Video staffers at Montgomery County operate the television systems for a live county council meeting. Photo by Bob Kovacs
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Just outside Washington, in
sprawling and densely populated
Montgomery County, Md., the
Office of Cable and Communications
team had to come up with a
plan to feed simultaneous programs
to different county population centers,
using government channels on
three local cable companies. As with so many questions
in the past few years, the answer contained the
words “the Internet.”
Jim Graham, chief engineer for the county’s
Department of Technology Services, noted that the
county wanted to reach out into the community.
“We have a mobile production van and looked
for ways to get video live,” Graham said.
The traditional ways to get a live broadcast on
the air (or onto cable channels) are all expensive and
complicated. There’s microwave, which involves
costly transmitters, receivers and towers, and there’s
satellite, which involves expensive gear and pricey
bandwidth-limited transponder time.
Graham and the television team at Montgomery
County ruled both these out
because of the cost and complexity.
However, that still left
a need to get live video from
around the county back to
the main control center, so
that it could be fed to the
appropriate cable company.
That’s where the Internet
came in, in the form of the
county’s own network that it
calls “FiberNet.”
MORE THAN 300 BUILDINGS
Montgomery County has its own in-house networking
staff, which is overseeing the installation of countyowned
high-speed data circuits to official buildings.
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Montgomery County had a new Council Room built in 2009. Photo by Bob Kovacs
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“So far, 302 buildings have a dedicated fiber connection
to the network and there’s another 30 in the
works,” said John Castner, manager of network
solutions and services for the county.
FiberNet goes to hubs around the county and
provides a web of data connectivity among the
county’s buildings. This is a data network that the
county wanted for its internal networking and it just
made sense to use it to handle increasing requests
for remote video broadcasts.
Using video encoders and decoders from
Streambox, the county can plug into an Ethernet
port in any of these buildings and get broadcast-quality
standard-definition video back at the control
room for distribution to any combination of three
cable companies.
FiberNet has plenty of bandwidth for multiple simultaneous
programs, and a 64x64 Leitch routing switcher
can assign any incoming program to any of the PEG
channels sent to the three local multichannel franchisees,
Comcast, RCN and Verizon. The key to making
this work was the Streambox 5300D/E decoders and
encoders.
The Streambox encoders at Montgomery County
have both SDI (with embedded audio) and analog
inputs, and they are set for a data rate of 4 Mbps. In
operation, the encoders may drop to a lower data rate if there is a lull in onscreen activity, but will not
go higher than 4 Mbps. This lets the video data ride
on the network with no interference to the county’s
many other data requirements.
The county has now outfitted its production van
with a Streambox 5300E encoder, which it uses for a
variety of programs from arts to government activities.
“We use it for the County Council when it has
town hall meetings,” Graham said. The county executive
(its top elected official) also uses the system for
meetings that are held outside of the main county
government center in Rockville, Md.
NEW CONTROL ROOM
The Department of Technology Services is building
a new control room to collect all the switching,
decoding and cable feeds in a single location. With
completion planned for June 2010, this room will
house 11 Streambox 5300D decoders, as well as the
Leitch router, encoders for PEG channel feeds to the
cable companies, a 94 TB Promise Technologies data
server and a Synergy automation system to control
ingest and playout. Integration of the new system is
being done by Rockville, Md.-based Columbia
Telecommunications Company.
To maintain broadcasts during a power outage, the
county installed a 15 kVA uninterruptible power supply
from APC, which handles the electrical load until the
building’s standby generator comes online. Two tons of
additional air conditioning capacity was needed to
keep the gear in the control room from overheating.
Elsewhere in the main government center building
are two council rooms with remotely controlled
cameras and large multipanel wall displays for vote
counts and general viewing. Completed about a
year ago, the third-floor Council Room has Hitachi
standard-definition cameras and Hitachi pan/tilt systems.
Behind the wall of the Council Room is a control
room where operators control the cameras,
monitor video/audio levels and switch the signals on
an Echolab 2700 switcher.
For field production, Montgomery County has
Panasonic P2 camcorders, which it then edits on
Final Cut Pro workstations. Although there are lots
of VCRs throughout the facility, Graham reports that
they’ve gotten virtually no use in recent months.
There’s no plan at the moment to upgrade to HD
but Graham said that it will happen eventually.
Fortunately, there’s plenty of bandwidth on the data
network to handle the necessary data for HD video.
At the moment, the county’s digital signals need
to be converted to analog to be fed to the PEG
channels. However, once the new system is installed,
the handoff to the cable companies will be digital
and have one less encode/decode step. The average
cost per PEG channel to completely convert to a digital
feed is about $32,000, including equipment on
both ends, labor and IT connectivity.
Today, Ethernet ports are ubiquitous in government
facilities. Now that just about everything has migrated
to digital, governments are making the networks
robust enough to handle the huge amount of data
needed to do the people’s work—that was the idea
behind Montgomery County’s FiberNet.
Piggybacking some video on these networks is
not only possible, it’s a sensible way to transport
video and ultimately a lot less complicated, lower
cost and more reliable than the alternatives.
Bob Kovacs can be reached at bob@bobkovacs.com.
| COMMENTS (1) | | 06/29/2010 | | Fantastic, great job guys. You are one of the leaders in government programming!
Bobby in Missouri City, Texas |
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