Technology focus > Playout and automation
Digital TV Europe July/August 2010
Need to adapt content
As part of this need to adapt content for dif- ferent media applications, more and more channels are now looking for content to be delivered clean without graphics and credits attached. “It makes it easier for the digital assets to be used for more than just playout, but also for web video- on-demand and mobile, for example,” says Elvidge at Globecast. “As soon as you remove the cred- its you make the content a lot more trans- portable for smaller screens and it makes it
easier to add other information around that content window. Now people are seeing that the future benefits of keeping the material clean outweigh the initial cost savings to be had of pre-rendering graphics.”
The fact that the demand for many of these new services has coincided with the global financial meltdown has put an addi- tional unexpected pressure on the playout side of things. Every element of the process has been scrutinised for efficiencies. Making the video tape redundant and delivering files over the internet was the first step towards ironing out manual tasks and automating
large chunks of the playout process, and to cut costs further more and more platform operators are now distancing themselves fur- ther from the nuts and bolts of playout and other technical facets of broadcasting by out- sourcing transmission.
“This move to outsourcing has the poten- tial to create ‘media factory’ environments, where an emphasis is put on scale economies and automation,” says Mark Horton, product marketing manager, AmberFin. Red Bee’s Farrell agrees. “The media industry is converging and changing rapidly. As a result there is a growing desire by media businesses to outsource key areas of media distribution to trusted partners,” he says. According to Farrell, outsourcing media management services to Red Bee Media enables customers to reap the busi- ness benefits of being at the forefront of technical change whilst being freed up to focus on their core business. From the channel provider’s perspective, outsourcing has been seen to provide clear benefits. “As long as you have faith in the separate external links in the chain that get your channels to air and have moved entire- ly over to digital, you should see only benefits from outsourcing transmission and play- out,” says Paul Robinson, managing director of kids channel KidsCo. “Our expertise is in content creation and aggregation, marketing that content and building relationships with our consumers. We have found it better to outsource playout and other technical needs to experts in those fields. It’s also cheaper.” For service providers, outsourcing can make even greater sense. “We are always striving to improve efficiency as many of our clients have almost no extra revenue avail- able to them to provide these services,” says DMC’s Try, who adds that DMC can offer economies of scale, because it delivers serv- ices for so many channels that it can add new channels to its basic infrastructure at rela- tively low cost, enabling smaller broadcasters to buy as they need. “To keep up with the fast-paced technological developments, par- ticularly the migration to IP and IT-centric infrastructures to deliver playout, [our] knowledge base has to continually grow,” says Try.
Globecast provides a range of playout and broadcast services.
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