AEQ TALENT in chilean CNC MEDIA for remote production 28-07-2021

Article redacted by Mr. Marcelo Mendizábal - General Manager - CNC Media

CNC Media is the leading communications company in northern Chile, headquartered in the city of Antofagasta, which includes two television channels and three radio stations: Canal95, FM Plus and FM Quiero. We are also members of ARCHI, the Chilean Radio Association, where we are very active with new ideas and projects.

For a long time CNC Media has been a very daring company, unafraid to bet on the latest technologies available on the market to facilitate the way we generate our content. A few years ago we purchased several AEQ CAPITOL IP digital consoles, hoping that their digital technology would offer us a significant improvement in the audio quality in our transmissions, and that their IP technology would allow a remote control that we had never been able to enjoy until now.

In 2020 when the Covid19 pandemic situation forced broadcasters like us to look at new ways of working remotely, we already had that work in place thanks to the IP connectivity of our latest audio mixers. But we realised that we needed to strengthen our ability to generate dynamic, quality programmes, even if the constraints of teleworking didn't make it particularly easy. And that's when AEQ launched its TALENT portable audiocodec at the perfect time for our plans.

CNC Media already had AEQ audiocodecs such as the MERCURY or VENUS3 units in their studios, but they were not the ideal solution for a journalist to operate them from home, but the new TALENT seemed to offer the ideal solution: small, easy to use, digital quality with IP connection and robust. In addition, AEQ technicians remotely helped us during the first days to discover all the options of this equipment and to set them up in the most suitable way for our specific operation.

Currently all our top journalists have one in their homes, and they have been connecting to the central studios for some time now thanks to them. The control surface of the TALENTs is very simple and with just a couple of push on the buttons our journalists, even the less experienced ones, can easily enter the programmes, but also the PILOT mobile phone app gives them the option to operate them directly from their own smartphones, and what's even better is that they can even enter interviews with long-distance guests who come to the team via Skype or Whatsapp. AEQ's TALENTs are a gem, such a small thing can do so much.

Finally, in the group's technical centre we have a PC where we have installed the AEQ CONTROLPHOENIX MULTI application, which allows our technical staff to supervise the status of all our AEQ audiocodecs in real time and, if necessary, intervene to modify any configuration or solve any errors. This application displays on a very intuitive screen images of all the devices that are currently switched on and, even better, the exact connection status, as well as real vumeters of the audio signal that is being transmitted through them.

All the AEQ audiocodecs we work with, have the OPUS algorithm included by default, and also the free registration in their SIP server was great because it saved us from having to complicate the deployment of the parts by setting up our own.

CAPITOL digital desks with their VIRTUALCAPITOL remote control option, as well as the AEQ TALENT, VENUS and MERCURY audiocodecs with their CONTROLPHOENIX software have allowed us to stay on the air during all these difficult months of the pandemic, to be close to our listeners and even to improve our audience figures. We are really happy with the commitment we made to AEQ technology in the past.

For more information about CNC MEDIA, its programming and activities, please visit http://cncmedios.cl/