In a conference call with securities analysts last month, Gray Television President Bob Prather crowed that Gray was bringing new efficiencies to the 36-station TV group by building four regional control and monitoring hubs at stations in Tallahassee, Fla.; Waco, Texas; Lincoln, Neb.; and Huntington, W.Va.

That was easy for him to say. It's up to Michael Watson and his peers to do.

Watson is the operations manager at WCTV Tallahassee. He and his counterpart at KWTX Waco, Tim Musgrave, are in charge of building the first of the four hubs. Both may have roles in building the other two.

In this interview with TVNEWSDAY, Watson outlines the entire four-hub project and the thinking behind it.

Can you explain exactly what you are hoping to do with these hubs?

From the master control side, we are centralizing the monitoring and control of automation. We're staying away from a centralcasting type model in the sense that there will be no video originating from the Tallahassee hub. The video will all be ingested and originated from each spoke station. There simply will not be an operator required to be at each spoke station. The monitoring of the automation, the running of the automation will all happen from a central location, one of the four central locations.

How many stations will be on each of those hubs?

Generally, about eight per hub. Tallahassee will have eight stations with upwards of about 16 or 17 channels.

Because some of those stations have digital channels and low-power stations?

Most of them have digital secondary channels. Some have two, some have three, some have four. Some only have one.

Do you know what the station and channel count is for the other three planned hubs?

As it stands right now, it is looks like 10 in Huntington.

Ten stations? How many channels?

I don't have the exact channel number in front of me, but it looks like about 15 or 16. Lincoln looks to have seven or eight spokes with about 13 to 14 channels. Waco is going to have about eight stations with about 15 channels. Those are rough numbers.

What's the roll out schedule for the hubs?

Tallahassee and Waco are rolling out this year. Tallahassee will be pulling in its second and third spokes during the second and third quarters and moving forward from there. Waco is currently pulling in its third spoke right now.

So Waco is ahead you here in Tallahassee.

Well, I have two that are online right now. I have WCTV in Tallahassee and WSWG in Augusta, but I count those really as one spoke because they're co-located. The next one will be out of Panama City.

When do you think Tallahassee will be completely built out?

Sometime next year.

So this is sort of a gradual process.

Yes. We've discovered that rushing it doesn't do any good. Take the time, make sure the stations have a quality setup and a quality understanding of the process and then make sure the hub operation has a quality understanding what the stations are trying to do. We will roll the stations in individually rather than trying to do it as a big group bulk move.

When did this project begin?

It began last year with the new automation. We actually had the new automation installed when we moved into our new building a year ago. WRDW [North Augusta, S.C.] had the automation put in a few months later and Panama City had it put in towards the end of last year. You have to put in the automation before you can consider bringing them into the hub.

So what you're really doing is tying together automation systems in each of these places.

Correct. We were standardizing on an automation system.

Which is what?

In Tallahassee, it's the Floricalautomation system out of Gainesville, Florida. Waco is using Harris automation. Each spoke on the Tallahassee hub will have Florical automation, while each spoke on the Waco will have Harris automation.

I don't want to say it's a competition, but it's to see who's the better product, who's the better fit for what we're trying to do and go from there. A lot of Gray stations do have Harris automation so that will play into a decision, but there are a lot of advantages to Florical.

What we use in Lincoln and Huntington will be decided based on the performance of Tallahassee and Waco.

And they're going to use what for the monitoring in Waco and Tallahassee?

We're both using Miranda iControl which allows us to monitor 10 streams of | More …