24 TVBEurope Round Table


www.tvbeurope.com November 2012 In association with


Andrew Ioannou: “One of the roles we have is to simplify the discovery experience and take away that level of complexity”


Paul Stevenson: “Do we all play into the suppliers’ hands by wanting to do our own thing – re-inventing stuff every time?”


been talking to one manufacturer about this, but it is also considering building its own open API and saying to all the manufacturers: “There’s our API. You write to that.” This is almost like a


middleware that acts as an interface, pointed out Negus, which is something Grass Valley has envisaged for Stratus — it already works with some of the main third parties. Vendors can’t build systems thinking they will stand alone, added Bancroft. “The challenge is to specify, implement and support it. When the bit you connect to goes through an upgrade and doesn’t work anymore, who do you call to fix it?” “That is a challenge,” said Long. Systems work together, but not always exactly as you want them to, but part of the problem is due to the differences in each broadcaster’s requirements and which standards it opts for. “The way I do an upgrade now is I bring in vendor companies — plural — not just one company.” So, if something doesn’t work, he brings in every company that is part of that infrastructure to work together — it doesn’t matter whose problem it is. “Ultimately, it’s my problem,” So we have to work as a team and say: ‘We’ve got a problem, let’s come up with a solution’.”


Good customer service ITV has just undergone a Workplace Refresh, transitioning from PCs to Macs, moving from Microsoft to Apple and from Exchange to Google in the cloud, “and that’s had some interesting challenges,” said Ioannou. However, “people have been far more pro-active on the IT side than I’ve seen in broadcast. It’s been completely refreshing. The whole project has been a


solve it.” That does take time but it has saved money by increasing set-top box reliability and put it towards customer service, and he would like to see broadcast vendors take this lead. “Stop selling boxes and start being more customer focused.” Negus agreed. Grass Valley hopes to adopt a “prevention rather than cure” approach, to avoid problems happening. It is also looking to adopt best


company, with a large support desk, there is a management structure that ensures it is followed up and completed within a time frame.” However, all the broadcasters


wanted to avoid a blame culture. Long had recently faced a problem (that affected many broadcasters), where he could have justifiably gotten angry, but that wouldn’t have solved anything. “The only thing I wanted to know was: ‘Are we


“An area of our focus is to put software- based tools on to hardware applications and make it as open as possible to work with third parties”— Gary Negus, Grass Valley


complete success.” It has done about 3,900 transitions so far, and all of ITV (with some small exceptions) is being moved, which should be completed before December. For some broadcasters, good customer service starts at home. BSkyB continues to prioritise customer service, “because we need to be really good at it,” said Long. Rather than its installers setting up a dish, and moving on, they will deal with a problem that has nothing to do with Sky. If the television or Wi-Fi or amp has a problem, they will try to


practice from other industries, whether IT or even food manufacturing. As broadcast becomes more


IT-based, Long would like to see vendors include a chip to flag up faults early, making it easier to prevent and fix them. Bertioli admitted: “I can't think of a system we've bought that just simply works with no problems. It just doesn’t exist. That’s why customer service is so important.” For Viacom International Media Networks, “it’s about having an agile support methodology. Even in a large


going to stop it happening again and how can we improve the workflow next time?’ That’s all I want.” “All we want to do is get our content out there in an as least painful way as possible,” added Ioannou. So many man-hours get wasted going back and forth trying to solve problems “and all we want to do is make telly.” But, how can this be


achieved? “I think it’s a culture shift that we need,” said Ioannou. It will require vendors to expose some of their intellectual property. “The reason a broadcaster buys a


Grass Valley product is because of the functionality, not because you’ve a bespoke codec or metadata scheme. It needs a willingness to work together [with other vendors] and crack the problem and get on with it.” At ITV, “we don't just make


the purchase decision on price alone. It’s about the whole package,” including the after sales service, he added. Problems are going to happen, and fairly predictably — “usually when some vendor changes software versions or in the early stages when you are ironing out all the features.” However, as Negus pointed out,


“there is a cost to better support.” Long wants vendors to be


more proactive: “This isn’t about ‘selling you a service contract and anytime you ring us up we’ll be there’. It’s actually about a bit more than that: ‘We’re going to understand your business a bit more and work with you on more of a base level’.” He also wants vendor’s engineers to get to know how their products work in broadcaster’s systems. As Bertioli pointed out:


“Whenever a supplier gets a new sales representative, they are always in within a few minutes to see you, but when they get a new engineer you never see him.” All the broadcasters agreed that they


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