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Today, television stations are going through a significant process of internal and external transformation. The emergence of multi-channel content distribution (cell phones, PDAs, the Internet, etc.), a wider selection, audience fragmentation (satellite TV, cable TV, VOD,
DTT, etc.), the new technologies (like smart phones or PVR) and, generally speaking, the demand for information immediacy make your competition environment to be ansforming at a superior speed than ever before. All that makes that managers put their focus on the highest efficiency of resources, increasing their manoeuvrability when it comes to exploiting their most attractive contents and proposing a range of new tools that help make commercial space sales more flexible.
Departments which used to be of secondary importance for television station anagement are becoming more important today. Planning (mono or multichannel), management of programming schedules as well as the analysis of broadcast profitability in a particular
time slot are all crucial in this environment.
Likewise, television companies have learnt that their staff should give special attention to the tasks that generate value and remove from their activity lists all redundant, tedious and unproductive tasks. This implies that the workflow ceases to be ‘linear’ to become ‘collaborative’ with several teams working on the management simultaneously. All that allows increasing manoeuvrability, reaction speed and overall vision of all the station processes in a single graphical environment.
In the second generation, a clear necessity was detected to integrate and communicate the planning systems with the technical area, especially with the Content Management and Automation systems. On behalf of efficiency, communication must be bidirectional, in a way such that:
§ Any change in the planning is automatically reflected in the Master Control system.
§ Any content (and the associated contract) that is entered in the Planning system must automatically generate an Archive request, a command to the Ingest system or any necessary task prior to its scheduled broadcast.
§ “Real” broadcast, often affected by last minute changes, must feed the Management systems in order to automatically produce broadcast reports, advertising invoices, etc.
§ In the current digital platforms, it is usually necessary to produce information for areas
external to the TV channel such as, for example, the EPG (Electronic Programming Guide), which allows users to consult the schedules, synopsis, etc. of the channel’s programming.
Finally, an integrated management should avoid redundant tasks and process incongruence. As a “factory” and content distribution chain, the station should apply a unitary vision of these contents in every area. The Archive and MAM (Media Asset Management) systems must integrate their catalogues with the Traffic system through a Unique ID.
Thus, the new media and its accompanying contract could be registered in the desired area so the new materials can be later viewed in every area with all its metadata.
This modern philosophy of operation allows designing and implementing complex and automated workflows easily. Once the contents have been scheduled, Master Control will request the MAM to transfer these to the broadcast servers either from the on-line servers or from the archive. If the materials need to be ingested, the ingest subsystem can receive a scheduled task or the operator be notified of the pending job. Other operators
will be required to edit, perform quality control, etc. In any case, the catalogues of the different areas must be integrated and the information must flow automatically among the different departments.
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