WPLG PREPS FOR DIGITAL TRANSITION ALL ITS OWN

Next February, while the broadcast industry is preoccupied with the analog shutoff, Post-Newsweek's WPLG Miami will be making final preparations for a move into a brand-new facility that will make it the most technically advanced station in town.

Bad timing? No, perfect timing, according to the ABC affiliate's VP and general manager, Dave Boylan.

“We’ll be in great shape for the change because the new building is being put together with the digital conversion date in mind,” he said. “We'll have a new state-of-the-art facility, with new equipment inside, and an all-new tower and transmitter.”

The move was dictated by the growing obsolescence of WPLG's 45-year-old headquarters on Biscayne Boulevard in downtown Miami. Age was not the only problem. “It’s not very hurricane-proof,” said Boylan. “We would be in the storm surge and the evacuation area.”

With that in mind, the station acquired six acres 17 miles away on the I-95 corridor on the border of Dade and Broward counties. The location also puts the station right between DMA 16’s anchor cities—Miami to the south and Ft. Lauderdale to the north.

WPLG retained TV station architect Rees Associates to design the new building and systems integrator Beck Associates to install the equipment and plan the workflow.

Naturally, that workflow will be entirely tapeless and file-based. “There's no reason to go in any other direction with a new facility,” said WPLG Chief Engineer Darren Alline. “It's a proven technology and people who have a chance to start over wouldn't consider going any other way.”

Little of WPLG's existing gear will make the move, and the station had been putting off equipment acquisitions. “We've been very parsimonious in our investments in the years leading up to this, so this year at NAB we felt like we were a pretty girl walking into a naval base,” said Boylan.

The station did recently purchase Ikegami SD/HD studio cameras, and these will be trucked to the new location. But almost everything else there will be newly acquired.

While WPLG is close to selecting vendors, the station remains tight-lipped so far. “I have some pretty good hunches as to what I will implement, but I want to close the deals before I announce anything,” Alline said.

That won’t be long from now. “We'll be making those final decisions within a month,” said Boylan, who added that the station is interested in news production automation systems and is looking at three: Grass Valley's Ignite, Ross Video's OverDrive and a new system from Sony.

A decision on tapeless field cameras is also pending. But while the news from the new facility will be broadcast in HD, field acquisition will start out in SD and switch to high-def at a later date, said Alline.

“Some of the timing is beyond my control,” he added. “I have to deal with microwave manufacturers and how soon that stuff gets put in place. Plus, I can't afford to migrate all my trucks at once.”

Beck Associates VP John FitzRandolph points out that WPLG's move to a tapeless, file-based operation will pose challenges in staff training.

“The learning curve is going to be significant because they're not tapeless at all right now,” he said. “They're still in the shoot-tape, edit-tape, play-tape world.”

Like Boylan, Alline is a fan of automation but wants to introduce it cautiously. “I don't know that we would implement it on the very first day we walk in the door,” he said. “We're looking more at a migration path. We'd like to get into the building in a manual control room switching mode and then automate at a point that is comfortable for us.”

FitzRandolph agrees that moving to automated news can be a dicey proposition. “Some stations are very successful with it, but I've known others that have had nothing but trouble. At WPLG the thought is to build the new station for automation and run it semi-automated.”

One item that caught Alline's eye at NAB was a demo by Florical Systems and WideOrbit of a real-time connection between the former's automation system and the latter's traffic system. The integration enables a sales manager to see on a screen, in real time, whether a spot has been missed, and to respond by adding a spot or moving spots around.

“It would give salespeople more control,” said Alline. “They could prevent make-goods. Right now if you miss a spot or run the wrong spot you don't find out till the next day.”

WPLG has about 190 employees and Boylan expects the move to have minimal effects on staffing. “As we move to more efficient equipment, and as workflow changes, there can be head-count reductions,” he said. “But I'm not saying that's going to happen here. Head count can also come through attrition.”

One immediate savings WPLG will realize will come from the closing of its Broward County bureau since the station will operate closer to the northern portion of its market. The station will have a single news assignment desk.

Additional savings will come through the tower WPLG will share with Sunbeam's WSVN, the Fox affiliate. Both stations are tearing down their old towers and putting up a new one with digital transmitters.

Work on the building itself began in last October and is almost finished, according to Rees Associates VP Ralph Blackman. He describes the 68,000-square-foot WPLG building as being at the “medium-to-high range” in terms of size among the facilities his firm has designed.

Blackman said that after going through a spell “where nobody was doing anything because nobody could figure out what they needed to be doing for the digital transition,” broadcasters have recently sprung to action.

Rees completed three entirely new facilities in 2007: WFSB in Hartford, Conn., for Meredith, WPXI in Pittsburgh for Cox, and KMBC in Kansas City for Hearst-Argyle.

Boylan expects the new WPLG building to be finished by December and that new equipment will be installed during the first three months of next year.

Staff will be moved in stages from April through June, and the old downtown building, which the station recently sold to help finance the move, will be fully vacated by June 30, 2009.