Neptune is frame accurate, reliable and easy to use. It controls a full range of devices including cart machines, data archive libraries, video servers, VTRs, routers, master control switchers, logo inserters, character generators, UMDs and audio mixers. It is a powerful, expandable and highly versatile product, which is continually being enhanced to meet customer needs and to integrate new devices.

“Whether you have multiple channels of ingest, diverse and incompatible device pairings, or complicated outgest workflows, Neptune’s modules can adapt to meet your needs”

Neptune has a client-server architecture. The controller controls the broadcast devices via RS422 or network interfaces and communicates to the clients via Pebble Beach’s powerful TCP/IP protocol. There are clients for ingest, transmission and media browsing. A separate housekeeper is responsible for managing the system database and for generating logs.

MOS Interface

Pebble Beach Systems provides an integrated two-way interface to newsrooms systems such as iNews or ENPS using the MOS protocol.

Fault Tolerance Across The Range

Pebble Beach Systems’ automation products are extremely reliable and have been designed so that critical on air functions such as control of devices and playlists are resilient to client and network failure. To protect against device failure, Pebble Beach offers customers redundancy through mirroring both ingest and playout functions of the system. N+n is also offered for the more cost conscious broadcaster, where one or more devices can back up multiple playout channels. If a main device fails, one of the spares is switched in automatically and playout resumes from the point where the failure occurred.

Options are also available for a backup controller and changeover switch to protect against the unlikely failure of the main controller. The housekeeper and SQL database can also optionally be mirrored.

Features:

• Modern, scaleable, client-server architecture
• Standard hardware and operating systems
• Large range of device drivers
• Multi-functional clients
• Scaleable to 100s of channels and devices
• Unique integrated Anchor Media Manager for nearline and data tape library control
• Integrated browse tools with encode and transcode control
• MOS interface for news playout
• API available for 3rd party integration
• TCPIP or serial device control
• BXF, MXF,AAF,V-ISAN compliant
• Robust, reliable and proven
• Interface to EPGs