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Author: Matt Rigdon - Educational Media Foundation
California, USA
Educational Media Foundation (EMF) is one of the largest Christian media organizations in the world. Our primary activity is domestic terrestrial radio broadcast and streaming within the United States and some international locations. We reach nearly 14 million people and are ranked within the top 10 audio streamers by Triton digital. Our mission is to « create compelling media that inspires and encourages our audience to have a meaningful relationship with Christ ».
Prior to implementing Kybio for our uplink everything was manual, we had limited visibility into our uplink and monitoring was done through email notifications. We needed to bring better visibility into these systems and the ability to be proactive with how we managed those systems. The uplink is one of the most critical components of our broadcast capabilities and while we have a very highly available architecture, that single view for the uplink and our broadcast architectures just was not there.
The goal for implementing Kybio was to start with the uplink and provide a simplified, singular view of the status of our uplink chain as well as simplified control for the systems that support our uplink. Currently, to make changes to the uplink or even switch which systems were on-air we would have to login to each piece of equipment manually and make the changes, in the event of a possible off-air situation, this makes a huge difference in potential downtime for our audience.
Kybio has enabled us to streamline that control. This is just the tip of the iceberg for what we hope to be able to do with Kybio.
Currently the Satellite Engineering team uses Kybio, but our goal is to provide access to our NOC team for visibility to help support the 24/7 monitoring of the uplink. From there we will partner with other teams such as the Broadcast Engineering team to assess how Kybio may support their needs to monitor our Broadcast transmission sites and more.
We had assessed several vendors to see what they could bring to the table, but none of the other solutions provided the simplified, web-based interface with the controls that we needed that could be implemented as simply and quickly as Kybio.
Some of our primary criteria were the flexibility in the system, we needed something that was not just based on SNMP, but could really be tailored to meet the needs of the various systems. One of the pieces of equipment has a fairly rudimentary interface, and the Kybio driver team was able to build a driver that allows us access to that equipment which is one of the more critical pieces of equipment in the event that we need to fail over to backup systems.
After 6 months of return on experience
Going from limited visibility in our monitoring and relying on email notifications and less simplified means of control to a singular interface has brought a lot of value to the team. We are already working on planning what’s next to implement in Kybio to bring even more visibility. Beyond that we now have a singular system that can notify us when there are issues - which means we can more quickly respond to critical events and resolve them more quickly.
One of the functions of Kybio that has been the most useful is the custom visuals. Because of this we were able to work with the Kybio team to build a simplified singular view into the status of our uplink. This view not only gives us quick access to the status of our uplink for use by our satellite engineering team, but the ability to give access to that view to our NOC team and simplify the control interface for managing our uplink as well.
One of the services the Kybio team provides in developing the drivers for new hardware and software enables our team to quickly spin up new monitoring.
That service alone helps the team be able to focus more on what we are good at, and less on having to make sure we build the interface to the equipment correctly.
I would absolutely recommend Kybio to anyone who needs a simple, scalable monitoring and control platform. There are a lot of NMS or monitoring tools out there, but to be able to not only monitor, but quickly control your systems from a single system with the flexibility to support multiple protocols and be completely web based make Kybio a great product.
“We see the potential that Kybio can bring to centralize the view of our entire network. We have barely begun to scratch the surface of what Kybio can do for the management of our broadcast network.”