Britain’s CTV has become the first outside broadcast specialist in Europe to use an ODIN intercom matrix, the new flagship of the RTS portfolio, having relied on it for mission critical, long-distance communications during one of the decade’s most watched television broadcasts – the British Royal Wedding.
Having taken delivery of an ODIN intercom matrix shortly before the wedding was due to take place, CTV decided to use the one rack unit matrix, offering built-in state-of-the-art IP technology, for ITN’s coverage of the royal event, installing it within the company’s recently commissioned OB4 truck. The resulting event proved so successful that OB4, complete with the ODIN, has since fulfilled a string of high profile jobs including the Isle of Wight Festival and coverage of championship darts for Sky TV.
“I was very impressed with the ODIN, firstly with the form factor – it’s a single rack unit. For us that saves a lot of space, which is of course always very limited on a truck,” explains CTV Head of Audio, Ian Smith. “We really wanted to use ODIN on a large production, as that’s what we do week in and week out, and so we chose the Royal Wedding.”
He continues: “The wedding was obviously a high-profile production, so I had the normal stresses of that kind of event. We were hosting the studio in London as well as covering the procession routes out of Windsor Castle. ITN also has an RTS ADAM matrix fitted with an OMNEO interface card, so they extended the network from the studio in London to us in Windsor. There was a lot of RTS technology used behind the scenes, including RTS ROAMEO wireless intercom on site and in the studio, and, of course, we were interacting over fiber connections. ODIN performed extremely well. The client was unaware that we were using it and it did everything we needed it to do and more. Since then it has continued to perform flawlessly.”
ODIN condenses decades of experience and the latest RTS innovations into an affordable, extremely compact single rack unit package that offers OMNEO IP technology along with analog connectivity. With a standard configuration comprising up to 128 channels of digital audio over IP – fully compatible with Dante, AES 67 and AES 70 – ODIN also supports RTS Trunking technology to facilitate interoperation with other RTS matrices.
Looking to the future, CTV is already considering how RTS ODIN might impact the company’s workflows. “Broadcast technology is moving more towards IP, and we wanted a product that would take us into the future while still supporting our legacy products. ODIN does both of those things,” says Smith. “The longer-term view will be to install ODINs in all of our trucks and flypack systems, so they can be networked and we can scale up or down as required to make our productions easier.”
For more information, visit www.rtsintercoms.com
