PR agency – Recording the news:

A client of our who would prefer not to be identified wanted to monitor the television and radio for news articles that mentioned their clients, so they could stay on top of any issues that might arise

They had traditionally used a standard video recorder attached to a TV, and then moved to a DVD-RW system when those came out.

A staff member had to go and sit by the TV and play back the news each morning, and if something of concern came up, then that staff member had to get a member of the client team to watch this, and in them middle of all this chaos someone had to keep an eye on the clock to make sure the recorder was ready for the next recording session.

With the advert of digital TV the number of channels rocketed, and although it was now possible to get hard-drive recording systems “off the shelf”, it was still pretty mono-tasking way of working.

Supporting Role installed an open source media system called MythTV. The system has been described as a TiVo box on steroids, and has the ability (if you have the money) to record every single free-to-view channel at the same time. You can mixed Freeview and Freesat tuners, and you can have multiples of both. And then you can have more than one recording back end…

The main advantage to our client is that the system has a web interface allowing staff to view the recorded programs at their desk, wearing headphones, and which a dual screen computer, make notes or transcribe while watching.

The system we installed and configured for our client cost around £1200, and is fitted with a quad-tuner Freeview receiver card, and is currently set to be able to record 8 programs simultaneously, as long as they are only spread across 4 of the transponder frequencies (there are only 6 per region in the UK at the moment). It can be expanded with another quad-tuner card if needed in the future.