Thailand’s Prime News Channel Goes Ventuz

MCOT stands for Mass Communication Organization of Thailand, and the name says it all. With over 50 radio stations and two digital television channels, MCOT delivers news and entertainment across the entire country, even to the most remote places. The network also hosts the nation’s major news broadcast channel.

As part of the implementation in one of their news studios, MCOT commissioned System Integrator Centralnics Company Limited and Ventuz agency Interactive Asia to equip the studio with a state-of-the-art backdrop video wall. Both the network and the integrator were familiar with Ventuz and decided that it would be the perfect choice for their studio. Especially in terms of 3D look and design, Ventuz could easily meet all requirements.

The video wall itself consists of 12 full-HD screens which are powered by a single Ventuz server. Matthias Strohmeier, founder of Interactive Asia, explains: “We are outputting three times 4K from the Nvidia Quadro 5000 graphics board. Each signal then runs through a Datapath FX4 image splitter, which brings native HD to each screen. A lot of render work for the machine, but with a little tweaking of the content we are still operating at 60 fps.”

Matthias and his team prepared several content templates for each individual segment of the Channel 9 program, for which they are using full 3D space and dynamic animations – taking advantage of Ventuz’s strengths. A Ventuz Director seat in the control room allows an operator to switch templates and add additional content. “Of course, the goal was to provide the customer with a scalable solution”, said Matthias. “We have trained some of their staff in Ventuz, and now they add to our templates and create their own to accommodate their changing needs.”

The video wall has been up and running 24/7 since April 2017, and the network team is more than satisfied. However, the story hopefully doesn’t end here. “At the moment, there are ongoing discussions with MCOT about adding some Augmented Reality (AR) to the mix, maybe with camera tracking”, said Matthias. “We are certainly honored to be working with such a prestigious customer and hope that we can do more for them in the future.”