A professional broadcast television system for the PC

Robot TV

Robot TV is a software system built for small scale television stations. It was designed with the needs of Australian community and Narrowcast Television broadcasters in mind.

The Robot TV system will let you use a standard PC to schedule and playback DVD quality video MPEG's.

It can also make advertising slide shows of full screen BMP images (we chose BMP for its superior resolution) and schedule narration audio underneath each slide. This  makes it easy to quickly put together advertising blocks which are similar to that used in Australian cinemas (of course you can also use professionally produced advertising clips).

The system enables you to schedule advertising in a professional way. You can sequence a program over hours, then indicate how many advertising breaks you want, how many adverts per break and which clip bin to select them from. During playback the main program is split into segments and the advertising breaks are slotted in between the segments. All you have to do is make some format choices from a few simple options and it is all put together for you automatically during playback. There is also functionality for station identification slides into and out of advertising breaks.

The actual video output works through an extended windows desktop via a second video card, with s-video output or a professional digital output card. The system allows you to simply drag the broadcast window onto the second screen of your desktop which in most broadcast situations would be connected to your vision mixer. This means the system will work with virtually any video output hardware.

Robot TV Integration

What hardware do you need? The optimum computer is a fast PC with at least a 2.6 GHz Processor, although Robot TV will run on a lot less (we have tested it on a 433 MHz with 64M of RAM!). We recommend at least 2 X 200 Gigabyte drives, giving you a minimum of space for approximately 80 hours of DVD quality video. Most modern computers have an additional S-Video output for the video, if not you will need an after market video card that either has an S-Video output, or some type of digital video output compatible with your vision mixer.