Replacing the heart of a TV channel — CTB-TV’s playout

The context

CTB-TV, the community television station of Saint-Gabriel-de-Brandon in Lanaudière, broadcasts around the clock for its region. We’ve supported the station since 2017: cameras, studio, control room, lighting — the installed base has evolved year after year, piece by piece, at the pace a community organization can afford.

In 2025, the central piece reached its end: the playout system — the software that chains shows, ads and branding, 24 hours a day — couldn’t keep up anymore.

The constraint

Playout is a channel’s vital organ. When it stops, the screen goes black. You don’t “migrate” that system the way you swap an edit workstation: the new platform has to take over the old one’s programming, files and automation, and the cutover has to be invisible to the viewer.

And all of it for a community station — without a major broadcaster’s budget or technical staff.

What we did

We replaced the platform outright: a PlayBox Channel in a Box system installed on a server we built to purpose — a processor sized for broadcast, redundant RAID storage, professional video outputs.

That storage does double duty: it carries the broadcast and serves as a centralized archive library, where the station’s catalogue of shows is preserved and directly reusable on air.

The full chain, from sources to air.

The migration was prepared offline, validated, then cut over. The annual maintenance agreement that follows keeps the system current — and we’re the ones who answer when the station calls.

The result

CTB-TV broadcasts on a modern platform, with its archives centralized and a system its team operates day to day. The cutover happened without the channel going off air.

Nine years of relationship, from the first tripod to the heart of the broadcast: proof that our model isn’t reserved for major networks. A community channel deserves the same rigour — at the scale of its means.