The Colombian Caribbean Region, and especially Barranquilla, has a loyal following of sports. Not only for being the headquarters of the Colombia football team, there is also a strong fondness among the population for baseball and boxing. Therefore, for the regional channel Telecaribe, sports are a fundamental issue.
In response to this interest of the population of the Region and taking advantage of the multiplexing of the signal allowed by Digital Terrestrial Television, DTT, Telecaribe opened a second exclusive signal for sports, which was launched in 2017 with HD quality.
Simón Arregocés Tapias, head of Telecaribe's Engineering Division, told TVyVideo+Radio that this second channel is highlighting activities that are not of interest to commercial television. And the interaction of viewers during broadcasts is increasing.
He stressed that on the technological side, they have 10 mobile reporting equipment based on smartphones, accompanied by a microphone and a transmission system, which allow images to be sent to the Channel from all over the Region. This team is mainly in charge of sports content.
Telecaribe is the regional channel of the Caribbean Region, which implies that it broadcasts to the 7 departments that comprise it. Its operations center is in Barranquilla, including the production studios, the issuance center and the administrative area. They go to the regions when there are special coverages, live broadcasts or recordings of series, a topic that they are working hard on.
Although they do not have studios in each department of the Region, they have signal transport technology, both satellite and IP, which allows them an easy connection to make any transmission. Each municipality has the coverage of the Canal for its events.
Renovation for the new headquarters
The headquarters that Telecaribe has occupied for four years has four production studios. A main one for live products, the second makes the humor series, the third is dedicated exclusively to the chance draw and the fourth is for sports programs.
When moving to the new headquarters, they had to make a technological renovation for the entire Canal. They started by listening to the needs of each of the areas and thus prioritized the adoption of technology. One of the first investments was to prepare to broadcast in HD. Today 100% of its grill is in high definition, with the exception of archival material.
Simón Arregocés commented that "Telecaribe was not prepared budgetarily to assume the costs involved in the new headquarters, but today financially it is a solvent Channel. At the end of 2013 we received the first resources from the National Television Authority, with which we acquired studio cameras and a video switcher. Another topic was the video library, for which a MAM was purchased. Today we are thinking about a strengthening so that the system can grow."
In sports they are also growing. They acquired two repetition equipment, two mobile units, one of them with capacity for 10 cameras, the other is a little smaller to cover medium events. Both support the work being done for the second signal in DTT.
The Canal has not married any specific manufacturer for technology adoption. Its technical chief explained that the criteria for the selection of new technology are based on equipment and systems that have a cost that the Canal can access and that engineers can operate.
Among the investment projects that Telecaribe is preparing are the strengthening of the file system, which will go from 30 teras to 180 in online storage and acquired a new LTO library that added to the current one give 400 teras of storage.
The MAM will also be updated to broadcast content, in order to integrate the archive, broadcast and transcoding under the same system. For the studies, pending civil adjustments are also being made since they were moved to the new headquarters.
"We have identified some developments that may pose a risk to free-to-air TV, especially changes in video consumption, with VoD, OTT platforms, multiscreen. That is why we have migrated to the new platforms, in which we have invested in the last six months," concluded Simón Arregocés.
