With the world’s first 3D outside broadcast vehicle, the British service provider Telegenic is inaugurating a new era in broadcasting: the truck, which was built by Sony Professional Europe, has been in service since the end of March. The 3D OB truck is the fruit of comprehensive testing, meticulous planning and some eighteen months of construction – and the response, too, to increasing demand from the film and TV industries for three-dimensional images. In its first few weeks of service, the new Telegenic truck has been offering subscribers to Sky’s pay TV channels live transmissions – mainly of football matches – in 3D quality. In addition to high-profile sporting events, however, the new flagship of Sky’s fleet of outside broadcast vehicles is scheduled shortly to branch out into the field of entertainment.

An important place among the truck’s lavish array of electronic devices is occupied by systems from RTS/TELEX. One such is a 128-port ADAM matrix flanked by a variety of keypanels from RTS’s KP series – KP32 and KP12 being the models represented.

Dave Rowley, Head of Sound with Telegenic, explained why the British broadcasting specialist opted for RTS/TELEX equipment when fitting out the state-of-the-art outside broadcast vehicle: “In a truck like the new 3D van, there’s no room for compromise,” he said. “The equipment must be of the absolute highest quality, and since we have already equipped eight of our trucks with ADAM matrices and been rewarded each time with excellent performance, it was only logical that we should opt here too for an ADAM matrix.” The trump cards of the ADAM matrix, in Rowley’s view, are its connectivity, the flexibility offered by its I/O cards and – acing all others – the extreme reliability of the system. “Besides which,” added Rowley, “ADAM allows us to connect effortlessly all the trucks in the Telegenic OB fleet and our engineers are all fully familiar with it, which makes our task considerably easier.”