ATEME and Techex offer Olympic support
ATEME has teamed up with Techex to support its customers throughout the London Olympics in 2012. As a result, any ATEME customer broadcasting from London before, and during the Olympic games itself, will be able to receive full back-up, including telephone support and rapid delivery of spare parts for video transmission.
“We will jointly offer any of ATEME’s clients across Europe and the world telephone and online support, and have spare parts available for advance replacement within four hours,” said Techex managing director, Chris Bailey. “If any customers want even faster service than that, we can discuss that too.”
“This will enable any problems to be resolved rapidly so that broadcast services provided by these customers are not disrupted,” Bailey added. “I think this will be a great benefit to ATEME’s overseas customers who will not be bringing their own spare parts. The speed of response will be essential, reducing their risk, and bringing valuable reassurance.”
ATEME’s service will be provided from a common pool of spares stored locally. “Advance replacement means that upon notification by phone that any item of equipment has an issue, we will deliver a new one within 4 hours and only then pick-up the failing unit for diagnosis,” said ATEME’s Chief Operations Officer, Joseph Soueidi. “Under a normal replacement process the customer would send the failing unit to ATEME first for checks.”
Indeed ATEME will be on hand to assist with any problems or issues its customers may have relating to broadcast compression during the Olympic Games. “Even in the absence of failure, ATEME may assist with trouble shooting on a transmission or configuration or optimization of settings,” said Soueidi. “The opening ceremony is on July 27th and closing on August 12th, but most broadcasters need assistance several days before the start date while they are performing tests, so our service will run for 30 days from July 13th,” Soueidi added.
Although this service is only for the duration of the Olympics, it is part of a longer term relationship between ATEME and Techex that will deliver professional broadcast services on an ongoing basis to ATEME’s customers involved in contribution and transmission to, from, and within the UK.
For Techex the relationship with ATEME strengthens its reputation as a provider of resilient and high performing broadcast compression systems, according to Bailey. “We’ve known ATEME for many years and their MPEG4 H.264 technology is some of the best we think and so setting up this relationship was a no brainer from our point of view.”