President of Westford CAT, Erica Davidson, offers residents the convenience of streaming video-on-demand by utilizing an end-to-end solution from LEIGHTRONIX.

In an effort to make cable access a vibrant, active part of the Westford, Massachusetts community, Westford CAT opened its doors in 2006.

“We saw an opportunity to really develop this resource and allow it to give people a way to become involved and express their ideas,” Erica Davidson, president of Westford CAT said.

Starting out, the station had one channel, limited resources, and a limited budget combined with the need for a reliable, digital broadcast server.

“Our goal has been to grow our station as efficiently and effectively as we can. So the first step for us was buying the NEXUS,” Davidson said. “That let us get some programming up digitally right away and let the community know that their PEG access was growing, changing, and doing something modern.”

By going digital with the easy-to-use NEXUS, community members were impressed by the amount of programming and its professional look.

“Being more modern made it a lot easier for the staff to produce programming and get that programming on the air,” Davidson said. “Not only did the NEXUS allow us to do more but it helped make our channel look more professional because it was just less likely that there would be any errors compared to a tape deck system.”

More recently the station acquired two more channels, allowing for the opportunity to further expand the station’s content and broadcast public, educational, and government content on separate channels.

The advancement gave Westford CAT the opportunity to plan for the future by purchasing the UltraNEXUS, an all-digital, two-channel server that allows uploaded files to automatically be transferred to PEG Central, the LEIGHTRONIX hosted video-on-demand streaming service, although the station decided to wait until their Web site was revamped before utilizing this feature.

“By adding the UltraNEXUS we were able to have all three channels run off of the same easy-to-use system,” Davidson said. “Because the NEXUS and UltraNEXUS programming software will talk to each other, we’ve been able to completely streamline the way we schedule, which has been great.”

The now fully functioning three channel station soon realized that in order to serve the community to the fullest, they would need to utilize the Web streaming option, offering residents the convenience of streaming video-on-demand.

“We wanted to give viewers more ways to see programming and to realize everything that Westford CAT and the producers who work so hard have to offer,” Davidson said.

The group was eager to offer residents the option of watching programming online and felt the features offered by the LEIGHTRONIX hosted site proved to be user-friendly.

“We were able to organize the videos in a way that viewers would be able to search for information within certain videos,” Davidson said. “We provide metadata so that residents can search for videos using keywords, and we organize videos using named file folders.”

The station’s PEG Central account integrates with the LEIGHTRONIX UltraNEXUS that was already in use, making the transition from cable only to Web streaming, seamless.

LEIGHTRONIX made scheduling video programming easy for Davidson who said, “By adding the UltraNEXUS we were able to have all three channels run off of the same easy-to-use system.”

“We can use the same system we use for scheduling the channels to send files over to PEG Central, making the process very simple,” Davidson said. “The two systems are really talking with one another, a nice feature because staff time is very important to us and we try to make things as efficient and as simple as possible.”

Using the same vendor for both broadcasting and streaming their video content has come in handy in other ways as well.

“If we have technical support issues or questions about the products, we have the convenience of only having to go through one company and one Web site for support,” Davidson said.

In addition, LEIGHTRONIX’s policy for free customer support has helped keep the station’s costs down.

“In addition to the fact that the NEXUS and UltraNEXUS solution was affordable, one of the things that helps us manage our expenses is that we get free tech-support for the life of our products,” Davidson said. “We know LEIGHTRONIX is there, and we know we can take advantage of that.”

Utilizing LEIGHTRONIX products from the start has helped Westford CAT grow from their once one-channel station.

“One thing that was unexpected was how much PEG Central would be a complement to our cable programming,” Davidson said. “Our organization is about helping people tell their own stories and video-on-demand provides people another way to access those stories at the convenience of their own time frame.”

The now dynamic PEG access station is looking forward to continuing to advance their studio in the future.

“LEIGHTRONIX has allowed us to be inspired to continue to grow in a cost-effective way,” Davidson said. “By leveraging their technology each part of our station is working together seamlessly and we find our organization achieving more than we thought it could when we began.”

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