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Digital TV Europe July/August 2010


Technology focus > Playout and automation


Workflows across the transmission and playout industry will become tighter as oper- ations continue to move from being manual- ly driven to being managed. “The purpose is not only to manage the technical workflows or movement of content, but also logical workflows, the management of manual and automated tasks. While content production will continue to be a creative process, content publication will increasingly become an automated process,” says Baldock at Grass Valley.


It may also surprise some to learn that not everyone has found outsourcing all these processes effective. “We have recently seen broadcasters who previously outsourced playout bringing it back in-house. These broadcasters achieved their own economies of scale and were able to lower their opera- tional costs,” says Miranda’s Proulx. Fletcher at OmniBus Systems backs this view up: “The falling cost of technology, brought about by the introduction of iTX, is encouraging some broadcasters to bring transmission back in-house, where they feel they can be more in control of their content


and branding.”


The demand for cost savings has also spurred the growth in software, rather than hardware. “Playout servers are increasingly software, rather than hardware, based. Encoding, multiplexing, graphics functional- ity is driven more by software. Smaller broadcasters are looking to have access to digital asset management systems that can receive regular software updates to increase their functionality,” says Elvidge at GlobeCast. “Consequently, more vendors are providing standalone software, rather than software and hardware together. The soft- ware market is now starting to mature and we are embracing this and less afraid of it.” Hutton at Pilat Media agrees: “We’ ll see an increasing reliance on software- and IT- based systems, and an ever-decreasing reliance on hardware. For transmission and playout, the good news here is systems that can provide industrial-strength capabilities while occupying a much smaller physical footprint in the operation, and thus requir- ing less power and fewer failure points than the previous racks.”


It is important to mange this software effi-


ciently. “Operators need efficient software workflow management systems to stream- line the flow of media and provide detailed reporting and management information for the operation. This is essential when han- dling so many different types of content for multiple platform output,” says Fletcher at OmniBus.


As broadcasters and platform operators increasingly tap into external content man- agement systems and rely on a patchwork of different software and hardware in-house, it will become vital that these different compo- nents can talk to each other. “Standardisation is our biggest challenge on every project we work on,” says Harold Vermeulen, manag- ing director of playout specialist PubliTronic. “It is so important to have an open infra- structure within content management and delivery systems that communicate with each other. We have to deal with a lot of lega- cy standards, often proprietary to a specific manufacturer and this stops customers rolling out services as efficiently as it could be done.” ●


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