COMMON PLATFORMS FOR UNCOMMON RESULTS

For Hearst-Argyle Television’s chief technologist Marty Faubell, the economics of full-blown centralcasting have never quite made sense.

For him, the cost of distributing the composite signal from the hub to the individual stations has always been too high to justify the move to centralized master control.

But he remains intrigued by lesser ways of centralizing operations and capabilities across the group, which now comprises 26 owned stations and three managed stations.

The group has piggybacked group-wide graphics sharing on its AP ENPS system and, in a similar fashion, is rolling out branding tools on its common WideOrbit traffic system.

At the same time, Faubell is considering centralizing monitoring and control of stations as Media General has done.

Here, in Part II of his interview with TVNEWSDAY, Faubell discusses centralcasting, centralizing and the topic that is never far from the mind of any broadcast engineer, the DTV transition.

An edited transcript follows.

I want to talk about centralcasting, but first let me ask about DTV. What are the obstacles that stand between you and a smooth transition to digital in February 2009?

Let me give you the rundown. We have 21 stations currently that stay on their DTV channel OK. We have eight more stations that are on the air now with digital that on the night in question will revert back to their current analog channels and operate DTV. We have one station [WYFF Greenville-Spartanburg, S.C.]—fortunately only one—that will go to a completely different channel. It’s now on channel 4 analog and channel 59 digital, which is out of core. It will go to channel 36 digital.

So, in harm's way, we have eight stations. On a given night, we flip the switch off, count to 30, then flip it back on and when we do we will go from analog to digital. That’s much easier said than done and there’s a lot of work that has to go on within that 30 seconds.

We have a tower at one station that not only has to support two antennas, but will have to support a third for some duration while we dismantle the other two. So you’re looking at a substantial construction project to beef up that tower,

I did an interview with Don Doty at Stainless. He said that if broadcasters get their orders in now, they should all be able to get all their tower work done on time. Do you think that that’s true?

In some ways, the answer is yes. But I don’t have a high degree of confidence that, as the date comes closer, that comment won’t get changed.

Well, he did put that big qualifier in there. He said, “If you get your orders in now.”

I can just tell you that the guy cable insulators that we ordered in NewOrleans just doubled in terms of their delivery deadline and that’s now put us two months behind schedule. So, from my own experience, a key component of that tower overhaul isn’t available in the time frame that we had expected and we had orders in for it long ago.

What are you going to do with your extra bits? Have you got a plan for your digital channels beyond the main channel?

In most of our markets today, in addition to doing high-definition feeds, we have got ancillary services up. Most markets have one and some have two ancillary services. All of our 10 NBC affiliates have NBC Weather Plus and several of the ABC stations are doing a service called Weather Now. In addition, one or two have some other services up, radar and the like.

Further compression would probably yield more channels and the question is, what’s the best business application for those extra bits. The company is constantly evaluating that. We’re not a member of the Open Mobile Video Coalition at this point, but we’re looking at everything.

I noticed that, on your Web site, you group your TV stations into three regions, which suggests centralcasting. I know that Hearst-Argyle several years ago looked pretty hard at centralcasting. Anything become of that?

You’re right. We, like every other group, looked very hard and long at the benefits, the efficiencies, the entire model. But the economics, then and even now, remain elusive.

The cost to move the work from one location to another isn’t the stopper. It’s the cost of transporting the composite signal back to the stations. And now we have to consider the cost of transporting high definition from the hub. We would go from typically 5 megabits for SD to about 20 megabits for HD.

So, while the cost of the transport may be dropping, I have to buy four times more bandwidth to transport the HD signal. If it didn’t make sense for me to do it at standard-def rates, it isn’t going to get much easier to do it at HD rates.

There are two models of centralcasting. One is where you create a composite to feed back to the station. The other is where the station has all of the content and all of the equipment and you remotely control the operation of that station from someplace else.

That model has been employed by Media General. It’s a model that we’ve looked at it and would be closer to doing. We’ll probably be doing some trials at some point.

Is there anything else you would like to share with your industry peers?

Something that we’ve been very successful with has been a program that we started several years ago, which we refer to as HATMOS.

HAT is Hearst-Argyle Television. What’s the MOS?

MOS stands for media object server. It’s not a very good acronym. It was created by the AP. It’s protocol communications language that exists between the newsroom computer systems and production equipment.

We took advantage of that and created a system internally that permits sharing of graphics across all the stations in the group. When an artist creates a graphic or some other element anywhere in the company, it’s databased and made available to everybody else in the company.

It gives producers, directors and reporters, through ENPS, the ability to create on-air graphics on their desktops. We now share among the stations in excess of 10,000 graphics a month.

You can do a textural search, find a graphic, integrate it with other graphics materials and drop it into your script. The automation calls it up and puts it on air.

Do you think that’s unique?

It was when we started this. You literally could not buy that. Today, there are two, if not three companies, that do derivatives of this. It’s the opposite of graphics centralization that NBC and perhaps some others have adopted. In our model, you create what you need at your station, but when you do you enable everyone else to share it and use it.

We’re have also standardized our traffic system and are moving forward with various other production tools around that system.

What traffic system have you settled on?

WideOrbit.

And so you’re going to stretch that across the entire group now?

No, it already has been done, but much like we leveraged ENPS to do HATMOS, we are going to use WideOrbit to enable a new branding tool throughout the company as we move to HD. We’ll use it for snipes and running business and school closing, you name it—all the textural material that you’re used to seeing on the bottom of your screen.

You’re going to use the traffic system to generate crawls. Do I have that right?

The traffic system is the front end of any station’s automation system. It effectively creates the playlist of the events that the automation system runs. Historically, it hasn’t gotten deep enough into master control to do things like school closings and snipes.

But standardizing across the group opens up new opportunities. We’re about to take the first step in taking advantage of them. It’s really being driven by HD graphics for our stations.

Will this one interconnected traffic system also allow headquarters to monitor everything at each of the stations?

It certainly gives us a different view into the stations as a whole. Now, you don’t have silos of information. You have one consistent data base, which you can interrogate and find answers.

So [Hearst-Argyle CEO] David Barrett can sit there and look over everybody’s shoulder.

Well, Harry, he certainly looks over my shoulder.