In Broadcast - June 2014 - 36

I N T E R N A T I O N A L

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 32 - JUNE 2014

N E W S

InFILE

The Rapidly Evolving Business Of
Broadcast Management Solutions
By Kieron Seth
Contributing Editor

ccording to a December 2011
freedom of information request,
the BBC employs nearly 20,000
staff. Half of these are Londonbased, with the remainder in the
regions of Britain and in far ﬂung
outposts overseas.
The BBC is far from being alone
as a major media employer and
as multimedia channels grow and
demands to satisfy the second
screen experience increase, it
seems illogical to expect the head
count to drop. However, economic
pressures, technical advances and
improved working practices are
all combining to drive signiﬁcant
efﬁciencies among broadcasters.
Results can be impressive. In the
BBC's 2012/2013 annual report, the
corporation boasted significant
efﬁciency savings, amounting to
£580 million. This 3% year-onyear saving was made, claims the
organisation, "without a detrimental
impact on overall audience numbers
or appreciation scores."
In many ways, a broadcast
business is no different from any
other, with staff, premises, ﬁnancial
management presenting an ever
present and serious challenge.
However, besides renegotiating
rents and salaries, specialised
industry-speciﬁc technology plays
an important part in regulating
broadcasters' overheads and
driving the workﬂow improvements
they require.

Managing Business

ProConsultant Informatique
idiosyncratically names its business
management system "Louise".
Targeted at multi-screen content
providers, Louise is designed to be
highly adaptable in its mission to
manage and schedule media assets
which can include rights, contracts
and all associated metadata.
A recent installation at BYU
Broadcasting (the broadcasting arm
of Brigham Young University in Utah)
is illustrative of the functionality of
the system. The university runs
seven channels which are broadcast
to 53 million homes in the US and
go out internationally in three
different languages.
BYUB CTO Brandon Smith
explains: "BYU Broadcasting deals

with a lot of incoming and outgoing
media on a variety of distribution
platforms. We needed to ﬁnd an
IT solution that would allow us to
manage all of those processes in a
uniﬁed fashion to better maximise
all of our media across all possible
outlets ... Our interest in their Louise
product revolves around its ability
to centralise all of the information
about our media along with the
tools to execute all of the primary
business functions related to the
creation, acquisition, distribution,
and archiving of media."
ScheduALL Connector's resource
management system unites its
systems within the broadcast
business and across the supply
chain, giving real-time access to
the broader resource inventory.
Its connectivity allows users to
employ the full range of available
resources and avoid the threat of
over-capacity issues. Its ability to
locate and deploy the right resources
for each project is designed
to result in increased resource
utilisation and greater efﬁciency.
ScheduALL Connector can be
used by transmission providers
as well as all types of media and
broadcast enterprises, giving realtime availability and access to selfprovisioning consumers of their
providers' resource inventories.
"We are giving our clients the
capability to connect directly with
their customers for instant access to
resource booking. It vastly improves
the way our clients do business
with their customers," noted Rick
Legow, President at ScheduALL at
the launch of Connector.

BroadView integrates programme
scheduling and trafﬁc

BroadView Software's integrated
media management solution has
a long track record as a business
system. It offers a fully integrated
offering combining programme
acquisitions, scheduling, traffic,
advertising management, reporting

Myers ProTrack helps organise cross-department workﬂows

and automation management.
Recent successes have
highlighted the growing importance
of cloud technology in this area.
BroadView reported that GEB
America, the Oklahoma-based
religious and cable TV broadcaster,
migrated its in-house, serverbased broadcast management
system to BroadView Cloud, for
greater redundancy, anywhereaccess capabilities and lower
operating costs.
"BroadView Cloud allows us to
hand over parts of our technical
infrastructure that have added
complexity and cost. By letting
them do what they do best, we
focus better on what we do,"
commented Bill Lee, Director of
Engineering, GEB America.
M y e r s P r o Tr a c k h e l p s
broadcasters organise crossdepartment workflows, while
simultaneously enhancing
multichannel scheduling, sales,
and trafficking.
This is supported by a web
schedule plugin and an automated
cloud-based data backup and
restore service.
WHYY, Philadelphia's leading
public media provider, recently
adopted ProTrack to track the
lifecycle of every asset from
acquisition, to sales, through
to programme management.
ProTrack's systems integration
capabilities will enable WHYY to
seamlessly partner with Centralcast
LLC, a Joint Master Control facility
located in New York to centralise the
acquisition, distribution, and storage
of their content with similar media
facilities around the country. It is
claimed that this will drive signiﬁcant
cost-savings.
Vimsoft VimBiz identiﬁes its role
as helping broadcasters to integrate
engineering workﬂows such as asset
and service management with
operational workflows including
rentals and production scheduling.

It strives to help broadcasters
manage multiple networks in
multiple regions. Its customers
use VimBiz running on new devices
such as Windows 8.1 tablet PCs
to improve resource scheduling,
timecard reporting, inventory
management, purchasing and
customer service.
Launched at INC 2013, VimBiz
EVO integrates resource scheduling,
rentals, and engineering workﬂows.
It purports to tie together engineering
workflows - asset and service
management - with operations
processes such as rentals and
production scheduling.
Xytech's MediaPulse platform
manages all the complex scheduling,
resource and content management
needs of broadcasters in a
conﬁgurable, platform-independent,
browser-based application.
B ro a d c a s t e r s c a n e a s i l y
and economically integrate
MediaPulse into the production
platform, letting events scheduled
and managed by MediaPulse be
automatically transmitted and
monitored. MediaPulse manages
craft workflows, digital asset
repositories and all elements in the
transmission chain.
The platform also features a rules
engine that manages notiﬁcations,
labour contracts, status of orders,
and trigger events. Highly scalable
and fault tolerant, MediaPulse is
designed to meet the unique needs
of broadcasters in an increasingly
challenging climate.

Selling Media

Arvato Systems S4AdSales and
S4AdOpt are tailored for media
sales departments. The packages
enable broadcasters to efﬁciently
place advertising slot bookings
from an available advertising
inventory and help maximise
airtime both from an advertiser's
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