FOR-A Corporation announced that Henrico County Television (HCTV), has installed ClassX LiveBoard SCG broadcast graphics software to air video and other dynamic data-driven content on its channel. ClassX is a FOR-A Corporation partner.
Over several years, the HCTV production team has built an educational video library available on YouTube and HCTV. When the team started moving to shorter, more news-style content with a faster turnaround time, HCTV operations engineer Michael Stoeckle began looking into options to create more flexible and dynamic overlays for its bulletin board. HCTV will soon air local government board meetings and press conferences live on the channel.
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Last fall, HCTV designed and built a new HD infrastructure and brought in the ClassX system. The design is planned and built around players, live streams, social media, and real-time data, all going through LiveBoard SCG.
“The goal will be to make HCTV an extension of the great work of our whole PR team, keeping it current with the very latest content,” said Stoeckle. “ClassX is the primary tool that makes all this possible.”
HCTV installed LiveBoard SCG with GPI, PIP, Video Input Switcher, all three template editors, and Social Server/Player. ClassX was added to HCTV’s air-server and web-interfaced bulletin board software. “It’s very capable and has everything needed to run a whole bulletin board on its own, but for us, it plays nicely with other great tools. Three bulletin board zones go into LiveBoard on one video input, which is then cropped on three different layers to allow for interesting transitions from the bulletins into videos and dynamic templates.”
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The LiveBoard engine was designed to be remote controlled from the ground up, with powerful template editors that have dynamic data support, tickers, social media integration, and the flexibility to create, move, and scale as many layers of video, images, or templates as a PC can handle.
“A big benefit is that, with scripting, I can not only receive TCP/IP commands to trigger anything in LiveBoard,” added Stoeckle, “but I can also easily send TCP/IP commands out to other software and devices. In the future, scripting could create a lot of workflow possibilities such as integrating ingest and file-management solutions tied into ClassX.”
“I also like that the ClassX solutions are divided into different tools. The workflow between the template editors and LiveBoard is seamless. It is clear that they have made a lot of wise design choices, and I believe the end-result provides a lot of flexibility in implementation. The ClassX OS design philosophy is ideal for our application. It is fun and intuitive, and, for our needs, I feel like we now have endless possibilities. It has certainly improved the capabilities of our channel to constantly inform and be transparent to our residents.”
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ClassX is an Italian IT company that develops high-performance, reliable software and complex systems for graphics content management. FOR-A is the exclusive distributor of ClassX in North, Central, and South America. The agreement provides broadcasters and live event producers with the ability to create and play out ClassX real-time broadcast graphics integrated with FOR-A video switchers.
