18 TVBEurope
www.tvbeurope.com July 2012
“Any incidents get mailed out in an
email shift report. There are about 20 key IT solutions around the building; this is really an IT solution as well. On the broadcast side it’s slightly different; we have a queue set up, and the engineers tick them off the queue each day. “We also have an engineer sitting
in the gallery watching news and being a detective there, if you like. After the bulletin he fills out a template form and when completed and submitted it’s emailed to a group of people in operations, management and engineering — all round visibility to do with what problems have occurred during the transmission. “We can evaluate operational and
financial activity by business unit; these charging levels help the clients have visibility of work carried out. We produce daily reports: broadcast and IT system checks; a live news bulletin watch; and broadcast and IT shift report summaries. “This allows infrastructure assets
to be managed and tracked. We’ve got trend analysis to work out activity and
call volumes. We’ve also got long term resource planning and cost prediction — questions like, how many staff can we afford? “My tips for this audience? Don’t
have too many fields. Keep it to 10; people are more inclined to fill out information that’s correct. “If you introduce a system — and I
did — don’t be autocratic about it. You need to involve the people to get them to work with you. You don’t want them to think the system is monitoring them, rather that it’s of benefit to the business. “I always urge people not to
underestimate the time it takes — they don’t appreciate how long things actually take. You also get the issue where, looking at timescales, someone will fix a fault and then come back and log it the following day. That can throw your data out. “And don’t collect data you don’t
need. You must create efficiencies, if you can, to drive the costs down. The real message is that it’s a drive for efficiency to maximise resource and deliver a cost-effective level of service.
“Engineers are a type of person … as are journalists. You’ll always get engineers who are extremely hard to manage. They can be very good — but they won’t write anything down!” Steve Luck, ITN
NBC Highlights Factory: Nonlinear content delivery through effective workflow control for London 2012
SONY EUROPE’S Nick Smith introduced this case study by telling the audience that “NBC Sports Group, a part of NBCUniversal Group, is a platform that’s being implemented as we speak today. A big commitment NBC made in 2011, apart from the $4.4billion required to secure the broadcast rights, was to deliver the demands of the digital age.
“The challenge is to produce
all of NBC Sports’ new media output for the next three Olympic Games [London, Russia and Brazil], everywhere but broadcast — all the new media outlets so to speak. Electronic sell thru, web, mobile, smartphone, tablet distribution etc.
“The biggest change is you’ll
see everything live online and we’ll have much more production around the clips we present. Much more content, more live content, and a much richer experience. “Our platform is Media Backbone Conductor [MBC], for workflow integration and orchestration,” said Smith. “It is concerned with integration of all the different silos and driving efficiency through the use of workflow. Ultimately we take a platform from a company called
Fred Wood, Sony America, flew into London for the ITBW event
Software AG and tune it into dynamically managing the resources. This is a realtime industry and change is always going to be there and change is always last minute and it is always dynamic.
“The big opportunity of this
platform is visibility into systems and processes taking place at a business level, so that informed decisions can be made,” said Smith. Straight-talking Fred Wood,
Sony Professional America, had just flown into town for this event. “I promise I will try
to speak the Queen’s English, not talk too fast and not be too animated!” “London 2012, Russia 2016
and Brazil 2020 — that’s the scale of the project. They’re exploding, on the content side and on the platform side. YouTube distribution is new; they’re going to differentiate the experience in the online space markedly from the last Olympic Games. It has exploded since then.
“The goal is to create an
attractive and unique offering for consumers to drive traffic. NBC paid $4.4billion for the broadcast rights; they’re going to try to get some of it back through this project, north of $100 million revenue projected. “The challenge is to reduce the time to publish content, from hours in past Games to minutes this time on all the new platforms, with less people and less confusion — and to manage the cost base on a really tight timeline to an immovable start date!”
At this point Wood ran a video clip featuring Darryl Jefferson, director of Post Production Operations, NBC Sports. He said: “It’s a huge ongoing challenge. The Olympics means more concurrent live coverage than any other event, sometimes covering 32 simultaneous venues across a whole country. “We’ve been tightly integrated [with Sony] and had very extensive discussions about our workflows. The project team in general has been very focused on getting us the workflow engine we need to give us better
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