St Petersburg’s City TV-Radio Agency hits the road with 16-camera UHD OB van from Broadcast Solutions

Broadcast Solutions delivers 16-camera UHD OB van to St Petersburg

Broadcast Solutions has successfully delivered a new 16-camera UHD OB van to St Petersburg company City TV-Radio Agency, marking further success in bringing UHD technology to Russia.

The OB van is one of the first and largest UHD OB vans in the country and will serve the city’s own TV-channel, St. Petersburg, to produce large cultural or social events.

As the main broadcaster in St Petersburg, City TV-Radio Agency is responsible for TV production of events taking place in the city, including the celebration of Day of the City or Navy Day, concerts and political and cultural events.

Ilya Osichev, chief technology officer at City TV-Radio Agency, commented on the new OB: “Our company and our team have a lot of experience in large and complex live productions and a deep understanding of workflows and processes inside an OB van. From the starting point, we had a strong opinion and a lot of expectations, and we strongly believed that only a very experienced company could match our requirements for building a new OB van.”

For a lot of events, City TV-Radio Agency produces international feeds or federal coverage to be broadcast to the whole of Russia. The company works with various technology providers reaching production capacities of up to five large OB vans. With the new OB van, named Neva, the company is even more flexible and can now produce in UHD.

Broadcast Solutions chief operational officer, Wladislaw Grabowski, said: “We are thrilled to once again deliver a large OB van to Russia. Over the years, we have developed a strong relationship with the Russian broadcast community that trusts in our expertise and our solutions. City TV-Radio Agency is a very professional production house and it makes us even prouder that we could convince them to use our in-house developed control system hi human interface in their new premier production vehicle.”

The OB van comes as a full trailer with two extensions and offers 20 workplaces. The van’s infrastructure and signal workflow is designed for having signals coming in from external inputs through fibre or telco lines from different locations in St Petersburg to join the main cameras. Additional outputs are designed to feed large LED screens with the program produced by a second vision mixer panel.

City TV-Radio Agency and Broadcast Solutions, in building the van, trusted in Grass Valley’s UHD-native LDX86N cameras, Grass Valley Sirius router and Kahuna vision mixer. Alongside Riedel Artist Intercom and IHSE KVM solutions, the OB van is equipped with a Calrec Summa audio console and audio matrix.

With the hi human interface control system, Broadcast Solutions follows an entirely new road in the development and overall design of control tools for broadcast and media. With innovative configuration concepts and drag-drop functionalities, hi is the basis to simplify operation and control of all relevant video and audio technology within the OB truck, including router, audio and video mixer, multiviewer, Tally and signal management.

Delivered in September 2020, Neva is already producing its first events in St Petersburg.