BXF: From Post-it Notes to Holy Grail

While reporting this story, two items came up again and again: Post-it notes and the quest for the Holy Grail.

Post-its, the sticky reminder pads invented by 3M, are ubiquitous in TV station master control rooms, usually placed on monitors or other surfaces to prompt operators to communicate "exceptions" back to traffic, like a commercial that didn't air properly, or an unexpected program change that wreaked havoc on the evening's scheduled spots.

At the end of the broadcast day that information is consolidated on the as-run report generated by master control, which is then passed back to traffic. The report is reconciled against what was actually scheduled by sales, make-goods are slated for the following broadcast day and billing takes a hit.

BXF, which stands for broadcast exchange format, promises to fix all this.

The product of three years of discussions by over 150 people, representing users, vendors and other interested parties, BXF or SMPTE-2021 standardizes data exchange between traffic and master control.

BXF, which was published April 14, is expected to replace hundreds of proprietary batch and file-oriented interfaces currently in use.

BXF enables — among many other things — immediate notification of the traffic department when a commercial doesn't air as scheduled, allowing traffic to insert a new spot within the contractual window rather than have to wait until the next day.

This on-the-fly, automated communication between master control and traffic is what some station executives have invoked as the Holy Grail because, like the legendary cup with miraculous powers, it promises to eliminate make-goods while boosting efficiency and revenue.

And to do away with sticky pads once and for all.

"Walk into any master control room, I don't care what market, look at the on-air automation terminal and you'll see Post-its on it," says Joe Addalia, director of technology projects, Hearst-Argyle Television.

"Right now someone has to write down reminders, walk them downstairs, and hope it gets done. BXF will eliminate the whole manual process and allow us to do it faster, and we believe that it will help us gain in revenue."

How much revenue? "I hesitate to quantify it," says Addalia, "but I can tell you that through the benefits of BXF we will make more money in the sense of being able to be smarter about what we do and make more intelligent decisions."

Others have shared their projected savings privately.

Rick Stora, product manager, Sundance Digital, and one of the founders SMPTE's S22-10 Working Group, which published the BXF standard, said one station group with more than 20 affiliates calculated what would happen if it had to blow out all the spots in a half hour to make way for, say, a presidential speech.

"If they were able to make them good the same night, they would have an accumulated savings of $400,000 to $450,000 — just like that," Stora said.

Sundance Digital, part of Avid Technology, has just introduced its BXF Gateway product, which gives its automation systems a means of data exchange with various third-party traffic, program management and digital content distribution systems.

Just over a week ago Sundance announced its first delivery to WJCT, a PBS station in Jacksonville, Fla., which claims to be the first station to integrate standardized BXF protocol.

After only a few days of working with the system, Duane Smith, WJCT's technology director, pronounced it "a huge improvement."

At WJCT, the BXF standard helps link traffic and automation, enabling an efficient exchange between the station's Sundance Digital Titan automation suite and its Myers ProTrack TV traffic system.

Although Sundance has provided a proprietary interface with Myers for several years, "the new installation at WJCT is a full-up implementation of BXF," said Stora.

"The features of our older solution have been retained, but new BXF features have been added and the proprietary technology has been replaced."

Smith said information is entered one time into traffic, which relays it to automation.

"Reliability is better ... [and] we hope to get 20 to 25 hours man-hours of recouped time every week using automated processes instead of manual ones," said Smith.

While WJCT is a public station and does not carry traditional spots, Smith points out that it shares many issues with commercial stations.

"We have underwriters, and if we miss an underwriter [spot] at the 12 o'clock break, traffic will know that immediately and reschedule it into another break that can be only minutes later," he said.

"Before this, we printed out the as-runs at the end of the day, they were scanned manually and it was determined if anything was missed," Smith said. "The earliest you could do a make-good was the next day. If a spot is promoting the next program, that's no good."

Shawn Maynard, VP and general manager of automation vendor Florical Systems, who used to work at NBC, invokes the legendary chalice.

"BXF is the Holy Grail," he said. "Broadcasters have needed it desperately for 20 years."

Florical collaborated with traffic systems maker WideOrbit at this year's NAB Show to demonstrate how BXF allows their products to communicate. They set up a real-time interface that provided bidirectional live-log capability between Florical's AirBoss and WideOrbit's WO Traffic.

In the demo, AirBoss handed off as-run log data to WO Traffic in real time while material was airing. When automation detected a problem with an airing spot, it immediately conveyed that information back to traffic, which then created a same-day make-good — saving the station a lot of demo money.

Such cooperation between systems solves "the primarily problem that the interfaces between traffic and automation are old, clunky, proprietary and batch-oriented," said Chris Lennon, director of integration and standards at Harris Corp. and chairman of SMPTE's S22-10 Working Group.

"Traffic will hand off a file to the automation system, wipe its hands clean of it and say, 'OK, this is now yours to figure out.' That doesn't lend itself to a smooth workflow," said Lennon. "BXF lets us take an integrated approach rather than passing files back and forth occasionally."

"What BXF is doing is getting rid of all these proprietary interfaces and custom file formats, putting it all into XML, which gives it one particular way to communicate," said Matt Fleck, manager of integrations at WideOrbit.

"With BXF we're looking to eliminate all the individual custom file interfaces and replace them with a single standard one," he said.

"This allows us and all the other vendors to utilize a common communication methodology and get rid of a 40-year-old paradigm by moving responsibility from master control back to traffic, where it belongs," he said.

Master control, however, may have some natural resistance to ceding control.

"There's always been this dark room in the corner called master control, and engineering has always been in charge of that and its personnel," said Florical's Maynard.

"Having someone outside their department making on-air changes causes them to shudder and lose sleep at night — but it really is the proper business decision."

Although BXF has now been published as a SMPTE standard, its benefits will take time to be completely realized.

"It will be two years before you see the full power of BXF in the market," said Maynard. "What we demonstrated at NAB with WideOrbit is available today, but that's just about 5 percent of what BXF can do."

In addition to the generation of immediate as-run messages from master control to traffic, BXF is designed to automate dub orders for spots that need to be transferred to the video server, and to maintain a live log, whereby the playlist of spots is constantly and automatically modified — while eliminating the manual handling associated with these tasks.

BXF can also deal with program management systems, which stations use to manage their contracts for syndicated programming. It can handle such tasks as organizing the sequence in which episodes must run, when they can play, how many times can they run and so forth.

A company like Harris is able to apply BXF across a variety of product types. "We're putting BXF compliance into our Vision program management system, our OSI traffic system and our D Series and ADC automation products," said Lennon.

But there are still questions among many vendors as to how to implement BXF.

"The SMPTE-2021 document does not say how to implement it, because there are multiple ways," said Fleck of WideOrbit. "The specs don't provide implementation details ... [and] we want to make sure it's implemented in a consistent way."

Thus a Recommended Practices companion document to the SMPTE-2021 standard remains on the SMPTE committee's agenda.

"This will clarify some things and help guide people toward implementing BXF," said Lennon. "It will make sure that all BXF-compliant products will actually interoperate.

"Our deadline is to have that document at the end of this year."