TV for the 21st Century

PBS is leading the industry into a brave new world of IT.

July 21, 2003 (Computerworld)

Borrowing supply chain automation concepts from the manufacturing world, Public Broadcasting Service is reinventing the way it manages and distributes television programs. The overhaul, expected to be completed by 2006, will fundamentally change the dynamics and economics of TV broadcasting, PBS says.

Today, PBS distributes programs to its 177 member stations as real-time video streams from satellites. A single show may be sent a dozen times, depending on the time zone, scheduling and weather conditions. Many of these transmissions require someone at the station to be standing by to "catch" the transmission to videotape or on a video server.

Indeed, the entire programming supply chain—from the content producer to PBS to local stations—is punctuated by laborious, exacting and error-prone manual procedures. And it requires punishingly expensive and specialized broadcast equipment. Every station has "master control" equipment that can cost more than $10 million.

But PBS aims to replace the pricey gear with Intel-based computers; the real-time video feeds with store-and-forward, IP-based file transmissions; the physical handling of tapes with drag-and-drop mouse movements; and the labor-intensive quality control with software.

Andre Mendes, chief technology integration officer at PBS in Alexandria, Va., says the new technology will improve broadcast reliability and quality and enable new broadcast services. It will save PBS and its member stations more than $100 million annually, and it will allow the survival of some stations now on the brink of bankruptcy, he says.

Progress at PBS

PBS technicians may run through a videotaped show several times—once to check for quality, again to insert V-chip information, again to add branding and logos, then again to add closed captioning or Spanish audio, and so on. At each step, they do a technical evaluation of the entire tape, so a one-hour show might involve several hours of checks.

These multiple steps are required because PBS often gets show content in several pieces from the producer and in a variety of formats.

Under the new scheme, PBS will either get all the content at once, as a data file transmitted over IP, or it will get the individual components accompanied by metadata that describe them and explain how they are to be combined. PBS technicians will then produce the final show in one step. "What used to take six hours will now take one hour or less because we can do it faster than real time," Mendes says.

At the end of this single technical evaluation, the TV show will exist as ordinary digital data, subject to storage on commodity computer storage systems and transmission as discrete files over IP-based networks, either terrestrial or satellite-based. Currently, a tape has to be pulled from storage, cached onto a video server, manually scheduled and then streamed in real time via satellite and caught on the station side each and every time a station wants it.

"Now it will be dragged and dropped into a schedule, and it will be sent and caught automatically without any further manual labor," Mendes says.

The need for human intervention will go way down, and so will errors—no more tapes deteriorating from age, no more grabbing the wrong tape. Error-checking software and other techniques can preserve the integrity of every bit, just as with any data storage, Mendes says.

Change at the Stations

Local stations, used to getting pushed content only, will be able to pull programming over the network by clicking on items in menus. They will be able to use a Web browser to preview programs and, through a thin client, build daily and weekly schedules remotely on a server at PBS. At the right time, software at PBS will package the entire schedule and send it to a server at the station by satellite over IP, all with no manual effort at either end.

"Labor savings will be pretty substantial," says Ron Kain, chief technology officer at WITF in Harrisburg, Pa. "And if you don't have to devote so many resources to particular technical functions, you can repurpose those resources to produce more local content, where the real value is."

PBS has several stations trying out these concepts now, and it hopes to have the initial stations in production by July 2004. "We are transforming the broadcast world into an IP world," Mendes says. "Our complicated delivery environment comes down to a supply chain management problem, with just-in-time inventory and all the things we have been hearing for years from manufacturing."

"Because of advances in IT, PBS can really begin to adopt these supply chain principles," says Jim Wolak, a senior manager at Accenture Ltd. "Many industries will adopt these standards-based platforms and begin to do similar things."

"These concepts will probably be widely adopted worldwide because the savings and quality improvements are so compelling," Mendes says.

Public Television's New Supply Chain TV programs will flow from producers (manufacturers) to PBS (distributor) to local stations (retailers) to viewers (consumers) in a highly automated way. Programs and metadata describing them will move as files over IP networks via satellite or the Internet.