Starlight TV

Starlight Children’s Foundation provides hospital programs integral to the total care of seriously ill children in Australia. While health professionals focus on treating the illness, Starlight is there to lift the spirits of the child, giving them the opportunity to laugh, play and be a child again. An important part of our hospital program is the Starlight TV channel.

Starlight TV is aired in major paediatric hospitals around Australia. Produced locally from our own Starlight Express Room within each hospital, the twice daily live shows and pre-recorded content provide much needed distraction for children and young people. Due to our individual TV stations being run by non-technical staff, we needed a simple, powerful and flexible solution to deliver high quality programing on each of our channels. After a lot of research, we decided to go with Softron’s OnTheAir Video as our playout server combined with the Blackmagic Decklink card running on a Mac Pro Desktop.

Softron’s simple interface enables our staff to be confident in using the technology. To be able to drag and drop videos, shuffle the videos quickly and understand the interface quickly, helps us to cut down on costs for training and support. OnTheAir ability to save playlists and insert our logo as an overlay enables us to continually promote our brand throughout the hospitals which is important for our branding. We are very excited about the future of Starlight TV with the help of the suite of Softron products. Remote scheduling and trigging of playlists is something we are now currently looking into implementing and we feel confident in using Softron products to enable us to deliver our programs to the best of our ability.