STATION DESIGN IN A MULTIPLATFORM WORLD

Hank Volpe is getting to do something most chief engineers only dream about: design and build an entirely new TV station from scratch.

Except that he doesn’t consider the facility he’s now assembling for ABC-owed WPVI Philadelphia a station. “I tell people that we’re not building a TV station,” says the VP and director of engineering. “We’re building a local news and information distribution center.”

Volpe, a 30-year industry veteran, is no stranger to re-builds. He worked at Buffalo’s Capital Cities-owned WKBW for 15 years before moving on to Baltimore’s WBAL, a Hearst-Argyle station, and participated in major physical and technological revamps at both places.

When Volpe heard about the WPVI job last spring, he couldn’t resist. “I was happy in Baltimore, where I had almost finished the re-build there,” he said. “But way back when I was at KBW, this was the station you wanted to work at in the group.”

WPVI began life in 1947 as WFIL. It was owned by Walter Annenberg’s Triangle Communications, which also owned The Philadelphia Inquirer and launched TV Guide. The ABC affiliate was well known for producing successful local programs, including American Bandstand, which was picked up nationally by ABC in 1957.

In 1971 Triangle sold WFIL to Cap Cities, which changed the call letters to WPVI. In 1985 Cap Cities purchased ABC, and the station went from affiliate to O&O.

WPVI has been in its present location for over 40 years. When its circular building on City Line Avenue on Philadelphia’s Main Line first opened in the mid-1960s, it was considered the latest word in broadcasting.

But in recent years it was determined that the aging plant needed to be replaced, and when an adjacent playing field of a college became available, the station bought the property as the site for its new building.

As if to underline the vulnerability of its physical plant, during preliminary construction work last June, WPVI made it own local news when contractors hit a undocumented water main, flooding the basement. “We almost lost the building because they couldn’t figure out where the shut-off valve was,” Volpe said.

The new building will have 107,000 square feet of floor space and house two 40 x 60-foot studios. The old building will be converted into a parking and maintenance facility for WPVI’s production trucks. But still to be determined is the exact nature of the workflow and what equipment will be purchased

In this interview with TVNEWSDAY, Volpe describes the thinking that’s going into designing and building a station—check that—a local news and information distribution center in the fourth-largest TV market.

An edited transcript follows:

What’s the target date for the final move?

Labor Day weekend, September 2009. People come back from the summer, HUT levels go up. If we want to have a celebration and invite the public, it’s a time when the weather is usually great here in Philly.

Why did ABC commit to this project at this time?

Because it needed to be done. They spent two years looking at [the existing] building, trying to repurpose it. It can’t be done, primarily because of the workflow. For example, in the new building all the core engineering is on one floor—power plant, IT infrastructure, distribution, and so on. News is on an entire floor, including everyone who has to work with news: creative services, promotion, etc. All functions stay together as a collective unit, and we’re building in room for future expansion. 

How is building a station today different from building a station five or 10 years ago?

When we built a new facility at WKBW in Buffalo 30 years ago, we knew what broadcasting was. Today we may say we’re building a television station but what we’re really focusing on is creating a local news and entertainment distribution center, and a building that will facilitate that.

What specific new applications are you basing that on?

Nobody has a killer app for broadcasting right now, or knows what the next opportunity to make money will be. The one thing that’s for sure is that video has emerged as the killer app on the Internet, and we’re in the video business. Not a lot of broadcasters have an aggressive presence on the Web, even though we produce video material.

Once you produce it, what can you do with it?

The ultimate goal is to take the content that you work on every day, the thing that makes you unique as an entity in an area, and make sure you can present it to as many platforms in the future as possible.

But there are questions. Say we produce a newscast. Do we stream it to the Web? Do we make it available on demand? Do we make archives? How far back does the archive go? Do we handle it ourselves or do we job it out? If we job it out, how does the material get there?  

In our design philosophy, we tried to break everything down into simple things, like how many sources are we going to be dealing with coming into us, and how many traditional video broadcast services do we anticipate having. We thought about satellite delivery, main network, syndication, news feeds, material delivered by data—and we surprised ourselves when we came up with a lot more sources that potentially will come in as data than as video.

But you still have to have cameras, lights, sets.

That part has become the easiest part of the job. Sets are sets, lights are lights, studios are studios. We have already committed to some new equipment. For example, we’ll be using the Grass Valley Ignite news automation system. We’re already putting that unit into our existing building, mostly for training. But in addition to all that, you have to put placeholders in the new building for things you don’t even know about yet.

You need to do that so that if a new business model emerges, or a new opportunity arises to use your content, you have a method in place whereby you could easily hook up to that without having it cost hundreds of thousand of dollars to get into that business. And many of these fledgling things don’t have much of a return on day one, so if it’s going cost you, say, $300,000 to get into the game and you’re only projecting $50,000 a year on it, you’re not even going to give it a try.

Are vendors breathing down your neck?

Constantly. They sit there and say, “Look at our catalog. We have everything you need.” But that doesn’t work anymore. Today you need to know why you’re buying that piece of equipment. It was a lot easier when this was just a broadcast business, and you needed so many tape machines, and maybe another router and a master control switcher.

How do you plan for the new paradigm?

You can steal a little bit from the IT world, where, when people build operating systems, they have a design philosophy. They ponder things like, how will we handle integrating devices into computers that haven’t even been invented yet? What we’re doing now is trying to come up with our design philosophy.

What about handling traffic?

Right now our traffic is locally controlled, but will it always be that way? Will there be a day when commercials are delivered via some sort of network delivery system to a box that has metadata that can magically integrate itself right into our traffic log? I don’t know. But if you’re going to do that, how are you going to handle those types of instructions coming in from the outside? These are all questions we’re asking.

Talk about your present high-def activities.

We transmit in HD and our news is in HD, though our field production is still SD. We use Ikegami cameras in the studio and a Grass Valley Trinix digital router. All that equipment is new—including camera robotics and test gear—and we’ll move it to the new building. Our house format is 720p.

When you go to HD field acquisition, will that also be 720p?

Panasonic now has a 720p camera for that, and Sony says it will also have one. The manufacturers are coming around and supporting 720p for news.

Do you transmit digitally now?

Yes, we have three streams up: a main HD stream; another stream that’s basically local and national public affairs information, including material from our bureaus in Trenton, N.J., and Wilmington, Del., that’s repeated on a wheel; and an AccuWeather channel.

Are they all carried by cable?

Comcast and Verizon FiOS in the area carry all three streams. But some the smaller cable providers don’t have room on their system for the other two.

Is the new building’s architectural design complete?

Yes. We’re doing this in three phases. In phase one, which will end soon, we worked with the integration team to help us with architectural matters. Some of it is pretty mundane, like where will the plasma monitor go in an office, will there be an HDMI interface, where will we put the risers that carry cables between floors.

Phase 2, which is coming now, is more creative. It involves equipment acquisition and design based on workflow. The days of buying a piece of equipment and saying, “I just bought that, now I’ll design a workflow around it,” are gone. Now it’s the other way around: what’s the problem I’m trying to solve and who makes the equipment to help me solve this workflow issue?

We're now drawing workflow diagrams and when we go to NAB we’ll have a good idea of what equipment we want to acquire, and hope to have all the purchases made six to 12 weeks after that, with deliveries coming in by September and October.

And phase three?

That’s when we will start the actual integration with an integrator, installing the racks, bringing everything on-site, putting it together and doing the training. It’s the nuts and bolts of the whole project.

Did you work with an integrator up to now?

Yes, we worked with AZCAR Technologies for phase one. We haven’t yet awarded phases two and three, for which we would consider AZCAR and others.

Describe the role integrators play in a project like this.

If I turned to anyone in the integration business and said, “I’m going to use Louth automation, Omneon servers and a Grass Valley frame, so draw me a diagram”—frankly anybody can do that. That’s not what we’re after. What we want is to say, “Guys, we’ve got a good idea conceptually of how the workflow is going to go. Now what do you see as trends on the horizon, as things to buy or avoid buying.”

Why might you use different integrators?

There are different requirements at each phase. It may turn out that one of them is lousy at architectural drawings but can do a bang-up job focusing on where technology is headed. That’s why we designed it this way. It does add some concern, and I think that once phase two is awarded we will probably stay with the same people through phase three because that way the drawings stay consistent. We did it this way because we felt more comfortable being in control at each step.

In all honesty, anybody can build. They can put the wiring together, but what’s going to drive that? What we’re trying to accomplish is going to drive the design, and that design is going to drive the workflow.

Do you still need master control?

At WBAL we did a full rebuild without it. It’s all automation. I’m not totally against it, but, let’s face it, what do you need master control for? Master control used to be this white-knuckle place with a guy talking into a microphone, rolling tape machines, dropping in slides. None of that happens anymore.

So it has become a keyboard-and-mouse environment?

That’s really what it is. It’s automation-driven, unless you have a breaking-news interrupt. And that’s part of what we’re grappling with. How do you handle that? We haven’t made the final decision on that yet. It’s critical that once we nail down all the details, we start to make straw-man drawings, which we’re in the process of doing now. We’ve got about eight weeks to finish this all off.

What about the transmitter site?

It stays where it is, in Roxborough, about five miles from here. We’re putting in a digital transmitter with redundancy, plus we’ve got some antenna work to do, and we’ll get a better generator.

Will you be equipped for transmission to mobile devices?

The MPH project [from Harris and LG Electronics] is compatible with the Harris Platinum transmitter we’re purchasing. You would steal bits from the main channel. The only problem for me with that whole system is that it doesn’t play too well on low-band VHF, which is where we are, but technology may change that.

The bottom line is that we have content. If we do it right, why can’t we push that content right out of our building to other providers who will distribute it? Why can’t we go directly to Verizon, to AT&T, and to our own Web site?

How much is all this going to cost?

They’d probably kill me if I told you. It’s a significant investment.