ITV chooses Quicklink TX Quad for live Lorraine call management

Lorraine is the early weekday morning, lifestyle and entertainment show for ITV presented by Lorraine Kelly. Every Thursday, the Lorraine show features live consultation with Dr Hilary Jones where members of the public can obtain the latest health news and advice.

The Lorraine team required a solution to allow viewers to join the ‘Open Surgery’ segment to get health news and advice from Dr Hilary. One of the requirements needed by the production team was to be able to speak to the callers through the Studio 3 Gallery talkback system, which was made possible using the Quicklink TX Quad.

The Quicklink TX Quad allows the Lorraine production team to queue up to four callers in a Virtual Waiting Room to speak to Dr Hilary during the ‘Open Surgery’ segment of Lorraine.

Before the production, producers send out Skype invitations to those that have pre-registered their interest on the show website. The production team are then able to line up the contributors on the Skype TX Controller management interface. John Barling of ITV explains: “Being able to professionally manage the contributors in a controlled environment is an important part of our workflow”.

The Quicklink TX Quad, designed in partnership with Microsoft, is a video call management system that enables professional reception and transmission of multiple Skype video calls through multiple SDI outputs. The Quicklink TX Quad supports both Video and Audio over IP as inputs and outputs. Features also include colour correction, HD recording and tally overlay return. The Quicklink TX Quad is also available with 4 channels of analogue XLR audio, allowing you to use separate channels of audio for each of the four simultaneous callers.

The Quicklink TX Quad is designed for live transmission with its high availability option. The dual power supply, raided swappable front loading drives and system monitoring with alert notification via SMS/SNMP/email offers piece of mind.