Transitioning Broadcast Automation

JOHNSTON, IOWA In late February, Avid announced their Final Sale Plan for FastBreak Automation, the name for the automation system they acquired when they purchased Sundance Digital in 2006.

Avid's plan included a list of key dates and events that are important to Iowa Public Television. We purchased our automation under the Sundance banner and made the transition to Avid's system, and through it all we have been very satisfied. Our long-range plan has been to keep the automation system and the underlying physical infrastructure operational for the next five years.

FROM PUSH TO PULL

One of the fundamental reasons for taking this stance is associated with strategic planning at the PBS network, which is currently evaluating transitioning the station distribution model from a satellite-based push technology to a terrestrial fiber, cloud-based pull technology. The introduction of a pull architecture and services in the cloud provide for some fundamentally different ideas when it comes to designing station infrastructure.

We plan to continue with our current operational methodologies while the broader network system is developed, deployed and debugged. This will then allow IPTV to deploy systems and services within our local station environment that integrate and mesh with the PBS network systems and services. This is one of the visions of operations that I have had for many years working in both commercial network and public television stations.

Now I could easily get into bashing Avid for their decision to discontinue a product that IPTV, along with many other stations are committed to; that is human nature. However, I took the opportunity to review the Avid plan and noted that their road map for the product did include an option for support through the end of 2019, which, for IPTV, actually lined up with our long-range strategy. The announcement generated some discussion among the public television stations on the PBS Connect messaging service, which demonstrated that IPTV wasn't alone in trying to determine how to address this challenge.

After a couple of exchanges with Avid and with the leadership of the PBS Engineering Technical Advisory Committee (ETAC) of which I am a member I was able to coordinate a conference call between the senior folks at Avid and a number of the PBS stations that were concerned with end-of-life plan for the automation system.

MAKES SENSE TO ME

A couple of very positive things came out of the call. For me, one of the best was an understanding of how Avid came to the decision, and, while it is still an inconvenience for my station, I realized it was a sound business decision and one I would have supported if I were a decision-maker within Avid. The market for automation has changed dramatically since the original development of Sundance. Most of the manufacturers in the space have moved away from selling and supporting an automation layer within a broadcast environment to the channel-in-a-box solution where all of the infrastructure and control is within a single box or rack.

All of us have been through the experience of doing what we think is a fairly innocuous update to a component within a system only to find that the update somehow ripples through the system and things stop working and we then spend hours tracing down the issues and making corrections and adjustments. The channel-in-a-box concept alleviates a lot of that since the manufacturer of the system handles all of the updates within the box and hopefully deals with any ripples within the confines of their equipment. Last year, IPTV replaced our Omneon video servers with newer Harmonic (formerly Omneon) servers, and we went through some debugging and adjustments to get the new replacements to work within the our station infrastructure. It was not a huge issue for us, just an inconvenience, but if I scale that up to the potentially thousands of variations that are possible, it is easy to see where the challenges of support come from.

DECISIONS, DECISIONS

I was also impressed with the interchange between the other public stations and Avid. The questions and answers indicated that there were some opportunities to be explored, including some potential group purchasing of hardware, primarily the qualified Dell servers and software that are needed by many stations to provide for support through 2019. I was able to coordinate a face-to-face meeting at the PBS Technical Conference in Las Vegas just prior to the NAB Show which was well attended and allowed for more exchanges regarding potential opportunities for stations. Since then, Avid has reached an agreement with a distributor to fulfill the turnkey server orders, including all components and configuration. IPTV is still working with the distributor to determine final pricing for our systems to determine how best to proceed.

Given that IPTV has a hardware infrastructure that can be maintained until 2019 and beyond, we are looking at a couple of options. Theoretically, the easiest thing to do would be to upgrade/update our existing FastBreak system to meet the requirements necessary to maintain support through 2019. But even this has some options, depending on whether or not Avid supplies the replacement hardware, and the difference is considerable. If they do a complete turnkey, we are looking at investing about $125,000 in the project. If we independently purchase the hardware, the price drops considerably to about $66,000. Now while this sounds great, it does change the dynamic of the support relationship with Avid since they will not offer hardware support on customer-supplied equipment, only the software. This requires a separate hardware support agreement with the hardware manufacturer, which is certainly doable.

But let me share with you something that happened right after I arrived in Las Vegas for the PBS Technical

LINK:	http://www.tvtechnology.com/news/0110/transitioning-broadcast-automati...
	See more stories from tvtechnology

Most recent headlines