New Zealand's national broadcast company is looking to push out TV schedule information for its Freeview broadcast partners in a more streamlined way. Television New Zealand has tapped SeaChange International’s (News - Alert) software to streamline the creation and delivery of television content schedules for stations across the country to integrate into their electronic programming guides (EPGs).

Freeview is a non-profit organization launched by New Zealand's free-to-air broadcasters to help facilitate the national transition from analog to digital TV. TVNZ and its Freeview partners operate a number of national and local channels, which are broadcast on the national free-to-air terrestrial and satellite platforms.

The SeaChange CASIS and STAGIS technology is enabling TVNZ to aggregate, schedule and generate Digital Video Broadcasting-Service Information (DVB-SI) tables for those partners. The linear broadcast software is geared to support various aspects of DVB-SI, such as service discovery and selection, populating EPGs with schedules and signaling DVRs to record shows. SeaChange software handles metadata to ensure program management and accurate EPGs; and it regionalizes for content tailoring to suit geographies.

"We're evolving TVNZ's technology platform in support of our broadcast partners and to serve our strategic vision for engaging all New Zealanders with the content and services they desire most from a trusted national institution," said Greg Newman, distribution engineering specialist at TVNZ. "We chose SeaChange to gain the advantages of solutions that dramatically improve our DVB-SI generation capabilities that we can pass on to our partners, while lowering our operating costs in schedule workflows, back-ups and configuration changes. In the end, we found the transition to SeaChange from our prior platform to be efficient and without disruption."

TVNZ will also use SeaChange STAGIS schedule management system to gather data from any number of content providers to maintain up-to-date EPGs, as well as merge schedules and automatically replace or insert information. STAGIS collects EPG data, parses the files, checks them for consistency and converts them into a standard format. It then distributes schedules to downstream systems such as SeaChange CASIS and middleware application servers. CASIS provides MPEG/DVB-compliant tables, access criteria generation and MUX profile scheduling.