Procurement News Notice |
|
| PNN | 7458 |
| Work Detail | Nutmeg TV is using a $20,000 grant to improve its broadcasting technology and offer the public better opportunities to produce television shows. The upgrades will allow Nutmeg TV to continue to let the public experience using high-level production equipment. "This allows the public to come in here and get the feel for directing," said Chris Farrell, Nutmeg TV's production technician. "If you don't have a position in the industry, you will never use production grade equipment. It's completely unique to have it here, especially compared to other public access stations." In addition to allowing the public to use such equipment, like the steadicam being purchased for the main studio, Nutmeg TV is also using grant money to improve the live broadcasts that happen in the field. The station spent $6,000 to buy a PortaCast flypack carrying device that lets it bring higher quality equipment to live broadcasts, such as a town council meeting, and produce a higher quality feed for viewers. "The reason this is important is that public access has to be equivalent to industry standard," said Joanie Sutter, the station's executive director. "If you're watching TV and then you hit access and the production levels are down, that's a connotation that we don't want. We don't want to stay there and we haven't." The grant will also give the broadcasts a higher output of audio, Sutter said, through a field audio kit. "We can go into a town's meeting place and the microphones may be an old audio system," Sutter said. "If you're at home and you're watching the Bristol city council meeting… you don't understand as a viewer we are just patching into their audio." Farrell said viewers will start to notice an improvement in audio quality that will match the video quality. "The audio system that we're getting is going to allow us for full flexibility to achieve that full HD sound," Farrell said. "It's on par with the full HD video signal that we're capturing. We bring our own microphones and set everything up the way we want it to be set up, the right way it's supposed to be set up, as opposed to whatever the council may have already set up." Sutter said the station focuses on using grants, like this one from Frontier Communications, to benefit the public. "The public has a right to this," Sutter said. "There has to be a channel for the public. We don't want it to be a sub channel. We want it to be equivalent to the industry standard. That's what the public deserves." The rest of the grant is allowing Nutmeg TV to buy new encoders to serve Frontier Communications. The current ones are at the end of their lives. "We need to provide a better distribution method to get to Frontier so the viewers are seeing us on a consistent basis," Sutter said. "We don't want to be down because the encoders are a problem. They've given us hiccups. We'd go off the air and that's not good." |
| Country | United States , Northern America |
| Industry | Advertising & Media |
| Entry Date | 15 Oct 2016 |
| Source | http://www.courant.com/community/farmington/hc-va-farmington-nutmeg-tv-grant-0908-20160906-story.html |
