CastNET Solo Provides 24-Hour Message Board for High-School-Managed Community TV Station
Brunswick City Schools’ Education Channel 22 (The BEAT) is a nationally recognized community channel featuring shows produced primarily by 6th- through 12th-grade students.
Since 2000, more than 300 Brunswick City School students have produced between 125 to 150 shows annually including news, sporting events, local concerts and Board of Education meetings. Topics covered include not only school activities and events, but also activities and events in the Brunswick community.
Commenting on the station, John Wasylko, Director of Community Relations for Brunswick City Schools, said, “We are extremely proud of the quality of programming produced by our students. We have received the Alliance for Community Media’s Hometown Video Award for Overall Excellence in Education Access for programs with a budget less than $300,000. I want to quickly add that our budget is significantly less than $300,000 and we still have won this award in three of the last five years.”
Wasylko continued, “Our community views us as a professional station and expects professional programming even though we are student-driven. To produce high-quality programs, we’ve been fortunate to acquire professional-grade broadcast equipment and systems.”
The station operates out of a 40x40-foot studio at Brunswick High School. A local Fox station donated the news set after the Fox station upgraded their set. The school’s broadcast equipment includes JVC cameras, a Grass Valley switcher, Marshall monitors, a Mackie mixer, four Final Cut Pro edit stations, a Leightronix UltraNEXUS video-on-demand server and a CastNET Solo Server.
“CastNET is the digital signage software we use to generate messages, announcements and calendars which are used for a 24-hour message board that is broadcast on the channel. We’ve been loyal CastNET users for several years,” said Wasylko. “We purchased CastNET based on our partnership with Mike Gruszczynski at Industrial Video. Mike has been very supportive in providing CastNET training as we have expanded the system into all eleven schools in the district.” Industrial Video is the leading video integration company in Ohio with offices in Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati.
Wasylko continued, “The CastNET user interface is easy to use and easy to learn which is very important since we have a have a high turnover rate as students enter and leave the program. We are able to quickly train our new students and staff on how to generate messages and calendar events for our broadcasts. Those with proper authorization provide content to the CastNET server from any computer with a web browser no matter where they are located. Once the content is created, the CastNET system workflow requires the content to be approved and activated by a Gatekeeper, which is usually me, before it is published. That level of security and approval is important in a student run station.”
The CastNET content is displayed as a full-screen message or announcement, a scrolling news bar along the bottom third of the screen and/or in a rotating message zone along the right third of the screen.
CastNET Solo is a single player system that provides two discrete channels of playback. It can be easily upgraded to a CastNET Enterprise system so that an organization can expand from a few displays to hundreds of displays. “We’ve had discussions about expanding our CastNET and video-on-demand servers so we can broadcast to digital signs located throughout the school system,” added Wasylko. “It’s nice to know that we will be able to upgrade CastNET when the time comes.”
