STATE OF THE ART MEANS MIX AND MATCH

When CBS decided to rebuild its TV stations in Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Chicago, it turned to Ascent Media Systems & Technology Services for help in design and installation.

The systems integration firm—A.F. Associates prior to its acquisition by Santa Monica-based Ascent Media Group—is headed by Executive VP Tom Canavan, who had been president of A.F. Associates.

Since joining Ascent Media, Canavan has been rolling up other systems integrators, most notably Sony’s in 2004. Ascent Media Systems now claims to be the largest systems integrator in North America.

In this interview with TVNEWSDAY, Canavan offers advice on what broadcasters should be thinking about as they plan new facilities or major upgrades, and explains his mix-and-match philosophy of station design.

What are the big technology trends now impacting TV station design and operation?

One of the big trends that will pick up more and more steam is the move toward software-based environments as opposed to hardware-only, originally, and nowadays, a combination of software and hardware.

You’re getting to products that have been introduced into the market, such as an OmniBus iTX system, where, with an off-the-shelf server from HP, you could literally run an entire channel. Those are the trends that we’re going to see more of and that’s more of an integration and automation function.

So, instead of having separate switching and character generation and graphics and branding and all the various functions, here you have the software package that will do it all, at least to some level of commonality. So, take those and look at the master control functions. That’s really where it will migrate.

News, of course, is much more complex. The advantages of gathering ENG material in a file-based format versus a more traditional digital or analog format, the ability to move those files around and edit either in a camera or on a laptop and then send the story in, are clear. That’s where we’re going to see more and more advances. And, of course, as those capabilities catch up in HD, it will become much more prevalent.

When you do your work, do you do the financial analysis? Do you look for the biggest return on an investment?

We often do technology analyses for our clients in terms of operational efficiencies and the cost of technology. Yes.

That’s a fundamental part of your job?

It certainly is nowadays. You know, it never was before. It was almost technology for technology' sake, but the business environment for everybody out there is very different now than it used to be.

Do you make recommendations on the ENG acquisition format for stations?

That’s an area that generally we don’t spend a lot of time in. Certainly we’ve been involved in integrating it, but most of the customers that we work with are either network O&Os or large station groups and it becomes a much bigger issue for them than an individual engineering issue.

But that’s sort of a key factor, isn’t it? Whether you go with the Sony and the optical disc or Panasonic and the P2 cards is critical because it affects how you archive things and how you deal with the work flow.

When you get down to something as critical to a station as the ENG format, people will make a case for optical versus file-based RAM or whatever technologies are out there. You can design a work flow around either and, ultimately, you could design a cost benefits analysis that will get you what you want out of either.

Both camps have very valid points, but I just can’t stress enough the importance of doing that work-flow analysis and the business case surrounding it before you select a format.

Work flow is really the glue here because time and time again we see situations where the implementation of digital technology, or file-based technology, in particular, is seen as a replacement for an old work flow. It is seen as a drop-in replacement.

And the biggest mistake made is not looking at that work flow up front. You should design it for improvements in operational efficiencies, improved quality and cost savings and then select the technology that’s going to accomplish your goal.

But you leave the decision on the ENG format to your client?

Yes. Our job is to advise. Our job is not to tell. What we can do is ask the right questions, not just of the engineering and operations staff, but of the business people, the station management, the news management. We can show them what the options are and give them a set of recommendations or prioritized recommendations, but, ultimately, it’s not our job to make a decision.

Your CBS contract is a big deal. What are the highlights of those installation? Anything particularly innovative about them?

I probably would not be safe mentioning it since we’re under restrictions on publicity so that would be better coming from them. To echo what’s already been said publicly, Philadelphia, for instance, is certainly one of the first from-the-ground-up HD stations out there. That, in itself, was quite a task. But as far as specific technologies, I think that would have to come from CBS.

Let’s say that you are hired to build a new state-of-the-art TV stations in a major market. What’s your approach to that project?

Major market implies a couple of things. It implies a lot of revenue at risk, right? It implies that the station is owned by a network or certainly a major station group.

So what that means is that we have to understand the big picture. The station isn’t in isolation. What are the network’s or group’s goals? What are its standards? What kind of options are out there? What is its vision for the station? How does it see it in the marketplace? How important is news and sports and other local content?

It’s going to be an HD station. It just it has to be. There’s no two ways around it anymore.

In every case, there are budgetary constraints. So, what are the priorities for the money? Nobody has a completely open checkbook.

We certainly have to look at the station’s plans for multicasting, what other kinds of channels they will be feeding out at what times, what kind of content, where it’s coming from.

Is the station feeding any local telco or mobile content providers, and what about their Web site presence? Are they putting up content on the Web? How is it getting there? How is it repurposed and transcoded for mobile and Web-based content management?

Once you get all of that, you look at any technology that can be repurposed. Chances are there’s not too much. If it’s going to be a new HD station, there probably won’t be too much hardware that can be moved over, but, in some cases, there is. Those kinds of pieces go in.

Then we look at working with the individual departments of the station to understand what their needs are to draw up conceptual plans and conceptual budgets, roll it all up together for the station management and say here is the first pass at what your station will look like.

And typically what will it look like today?

It will have sophisticated studios and control rooms with state of the art graphics because that’s where the look and feel of today’s media is at, considerable branding.

There will be a sophisticated and highly automated master control. In a heavy news and network market, they will have extensive communications capabilities out in the field.

The newsroom will employ some type of integrated news system. The producers and reporters will be able to edit at a desktop and browse proxies and they will have a media management system where they can browse for content and integrate it easily into stories instead of running down the hall and asking a librarian. All of these factors are in the modern TV station.

When I ask you to describe the state-of-the art in TV, you seem reluctant to name names. What newsroom system? What master control automation?

Yes. I’m reluctant to name names for two reasons. Number one, honestly, that isn’t my day-to-day job so I don’t want to seem an expert on one particular manufacturer over another. But really the more important reason is that we are an unbiased engineering and integration firm.

We work with all of the major manufacturers that are out there, whether that’s Avid or Grass Valley or Omnibus or Omneon. Our job is to evaluate those technologies and help our clients choose the best one. So, while one day we may install an entire end-to-end Avid chain, the next day we may install an all end-to-end Grass Valley chain because that particular proposition was better for that customer than the other ones.

So, it’s not one size fits all.

Oh, absolutely not. Now for the shameless plug. That’s one of the differences between us and other people out there that do what we do. There is no one size fits all.

That really brings up an interesting market dynamic. Years ago, if you were building a station, you pretty much bought it all from RCA, right. That was what you did. You went to RCA. You had a big catalog. Everything was blue and it came and it plugged together and you had an RCA station.

Then Ampex came into the game and Sony, of course, and Grass Valley. Then, it started to move away from that concept and the customer had a lot of different choices.

But it pretty much all worked together. Whoever’s camera you bought was always going to plug into somebody else’s video switcher because it was all base band and there weren’t complex interfaces. You could have your little bits and pieces of everything and put it all together.

Now, as you get into the IT model in the broadcast world, it’s quite a bit more complex and difficult. Software-based systems do not so easily plug together. They often need specialized interfaces. They always need complex configuration and testing,

There are people who believe that a soup-to-nuts, one-manufacturer solution is the way to go because they believe that it’s guaranteed to all work together. But we don’t necessarily believe that way.

We believe that open architecture is the advantageous way to go. We don’t believe that anybody, no matter how complete a solution they offer, is going to be the best in breed of everything, and we don’t believe that our customers would ultimately want to be held hostage to any one manufacturer or solution provider no matter how good they think they are today.

That’s essentially what Harris and Grass Valley are trying to do, right?

Exactly, and, to be honest, if I were them, I would do exactly the same thing.

There is some appeal with that. Isn’t it better to have the integrated whole work well than to have the latest and greatest in every breed?

Right, but that also assumes that it’s going to work and, with all deference to our friends at those manufacturers, I don’t think anybody has ever delivered a complex end-to-end solution where everything works.

Not even RCA?

Especially RCA.

That’s just the name of the game. And, in today’s world of consolidations and mergers and acquisitions, I don’t know that you can put all of your eggs in one basket.

Here’s the situation. In many cases, the customers don’t have the sophistication or the experience. They could have the sophistication, but not the experience to be able to do these kinds of integrations and that’s where organizations like Ascent Media come in. We do have that experience. We can get them the best of both worlds. We can get them the best of breeds. We can get them an open architecture where they could do incremental upgrades as their business plan and their needs change and we can get them a fully integrated system without being beholden to any one particular manufacturer.

And they call you if it goes bad.

Yes. We can help with that, absolutely. We have an entire service and support organization that can help with that.

This notion of centralcasting comes up from time to time in broadcasting. I would say now it’s out of favor right. Would you agree?

Sure. You’re totally right. It is pretty much out of favor in most cases. As you know, it was going to be the answer to everybody’s business plans a few years ago. We looked at it and, rightly or luckily, we didn’t think that it was going to take off and never really made an investment in it as others did.

TV stations are not, as many people would have you think, just transmitters with a source in front of it. They are very much a presence in the market. They represent the local culture, the local news, local programming. Centralcasting is incompatible with that model.

In addition, when centralcasting was starting to gain favor, the technology wasn’t quite there to do it as efficiently as you can today and the costs of connectivity are still reasonably high.

So, for lots of different reasons, it didn’t work. Now there are subsets of it that many of our clients have made to work successfully. There are station groups and networks doing graphics centrally. There are, as I’m sure you know well, groups looking at or doing some parts of news centrally, but, by and large, nobody was ready to totally take master control, play-out operations and everything, and move it into one operation.

I did an interview a couple of weeks ago with Ardel Hill at Media General. He said he is undoing the centralcasting at the four stations Media General bought from NBC.

Right. NBC really tried that whole model and it didn’t work.

Now centralized monitoring, on the other side, is something that we will see more and more of and that’s one of the services that we offer.

We have a pretty sophisticated network operations center in our Florida facility. It provides 24/7, 365 days a year of remote monitoring and control. For stations and technical operations that are under continuous cost pressure and continuous pressure to find talented engineers and operations people, remote monitoring can be a very viable solution.

The technology is there. Certainly the technology is there today to look at an entire signal chain down to board level and provide immediate notice of failure through e-mail and all of that. So, you know, that is a viable way to look at a signal chain, especially over large operations. We’re going to see more and more of that.

Anything catch your eye at NAB?

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t get too much time out of the booth, but obviously we had a lot of people on staff who did. Can’t really say there was anything revolutionary, or anything that really stood out. I think the biggest thing that I would look for is not so much individual pieces of technology, but what the trends are. And you know, I certainly wouldn’t surprise anybody by saying that the biggest trend that I noticed was the accelerating speed of HD.