WSAZ to become a regional Gray hub

If it's about broadcasting, radio, TV, satellite, cable, this is where to talk about it.

Moderators: Hoosier Daddy, The People's DJ, Arp2

Post Reply
User avatar
Mr. Jones
Member
Member
Posts: 587
Joined: Tue Jan 07, 2003 2:09 pm

WSAZ to become a regional Gray hub

Post by Mr. Jones »

TVNewsDay:
tech one on one with Gray's Michael Watson

GRAY SEEKS EFFICIENCY THROUGH HUBBING

TVNEWSDAY, Apr. 5, 9:17 AM ET

Just don't call it centralcasting, says the operations manager at WCTV Tallahassee who is building one of four hubs that will oversee master control and traffic across the entire TV station group.

In a conference call with securities analysts last month, Gray Television President Bob Prather crowed that Gray was bringing new efficiencies to the 36-station TV group by building four regional control and monitoring hubs at stations in Tallahassee, Fla.; Waco, Texas; Lincoln, Neb.; and Huntington, W.Va.

That was easy for him to say. It’s up to Michael Watson and his peers to do.

Watson is the operations manager at WCTV Tallahassee. He and his counterpart at KWTX Waco, Tim Musgrave, are in charge of building the first of the four hubs. Both may have roles in building the other two.

In this interview with TVNEWSDAY, Watson outlines the entire four-hub project and the thinking behind it.


Can you explain exactly what you are hoping to do with these hubs?


From the master control side, we are centralizing the monitoring and control of automation. We’re staying away from a centralcasting type model in the sense that there will be no video originating from the Tallahassee hub. The video will all be ingested and originated from each spoke station. There simply will not be an operator required to be at each spoke station. The monitoring of the automation, the running of the automation will all happen from a central location, one of the four central locations.


How many stations will be on each of those hubs?

Generally, about eight per hub. Tallahassee will have eight stations with upwards of about 16 or 17 channels.

Because some of those stations have digital channels and low-power stations?

Most of them have digital secondary channels. Some have two, some have three, some have four. Some only have one.

Do you know what the station and channel count is for the other three planned hubs?

As it stands right now, it is looks like 10 in Huntington.

Ten stations? How many channels?

I don’t have the exact channel number in front of me, but it looks like about 15 or 16. Lincoln looks to have seven or eight spokes with about 13 to 14 channels. Waco is going to have about eight stations with about 15 channels. Those are rough numbers.

What’s the roll out schedule for the hubs?

Tallahassee and Waco are rolling out this year. Tallahassee will be pulling in its second and third spokes during the second and third quarters and moving forward from there. Waco is currently pulling in its third spoke right now.

So Waco is ahead you here in Tallahassee.

Well, I have two that are online right now. I have WCTV in Tallahassee and WSWG in Augusta, but I count those really as one spoke because they’re co-located. The next one will be out of Panama City.

When do you think Tallahassee will be completely built out?

Sometime next year.

So this is sort of a gradual process.

Yes. We’ve discovered that rushing it doesn’t do any good. Take the time, make sure the stations have a quality setup and a quality understanding of the process and then make sure the hub operation has a quality understanding what the stations are trying to do. We will roll the stations in individually rather than trying to do it as a big group bulk move.

When did this project begin?

It began last year with the new automation. We actually had the new automation installed when we moved into our new building a year ago. WRDW [North Augusta, S.C.] had the automation put in a few months later and Panama City had it put in towards the end of last year. You have to put in the automation before you can consider bringing them into the hub.

So what you’re really doing is tying together automation systems in each of these places.

Correct. We were standardizing on an automation system.

Which is what?

In Tallahassee, it’s the Floricalautomation system out of Gainesville, Florida. Waco is using Harris automation. Each spoke on the Tallahassee hub will have Florical automation, while each spoke on the Waco will have Harris automation.

I don’t want to say it’s a competition, but it’s to see who’s the better product, who’s the better fit for what we’re trying to do and go from there. A lot of Gray stations do have Harris automation so that will play into a decision, but there are a lot of advantages to Florical.

What we use in Lincoln and Huntington will be decided based on the performance of Tallahassee and Waco.

And they’re going to use what for the monitoring in Waco and Tallahassee?

We’re both using Miranda iControl which allows us to monitor 10 streams of video and audio.

What about the trafficking software. What do you use?

Gray is rolling out OSI group wide.

All right, so that will be easy to tie together.

They’re rolling out traffic to the spokes along with some of the business functions. Master control’s coming along a little bit behind that because it’s much less expensive to roll out the traffic.

So why monitoring and control rather than full-blown centralcasting?

If the hub goes down in centralcasting mode, I would lose eight stations, 16 channels worth of video. I wouldn’t be able to feed anybody. If I go down monitoring the hub, each station still has all the equipment, all the assets it needs to continue broadcasting. It just needs to pull a warm body, an engineer or what’s called a media content manager, into the position to monitor master control.

With our hub, instead of having one or two people at each of the eight spokes monitoring the automation and running the manual breaks during live events and such, we can pull that back into the hub using simple RDP—remote desktop protocol—and the Miranda iControl and do it with two people.

So how many jobs are you saving here?

Guestimation: you save six people—three or four full time and two or three part time at each station. Six times eight stations is 48 people. We can do it with 10 or 11 people.

That’s a significant savings.

And that is just one hub. So if we do it four hubs, it’s very significant. It’s the same idea with traffic. Instead of having a traffic manager and a copy person and two or three people working the log at each station, you can maybe do it with four or five at the hub.

What’s the downside in all this?

To be honest, from an operational point of view, I really don’t see downsides.

It does change the way people do business a little bit. You may have a deadline of 2 p.m. for sales people to put spots on the next day’s log. When everything was located at the station, they could come down at 3:30 or 3:45 and still find somebody to ingest it, put it on the log and run it right then and there. That’s still possible in this scenario, but it’s more difficult to do. It’s structured in such a way that we’re discouraging that.

So the account executives are going to have to learn not to procrastinate.

Yes sir. You can’t run down the hall, grab traffic, grab master control and quickly make a change to the log.

Other than that catastrophic failure scenario that you described before, what else argues against full blown centralcasting where you’re distributing video from a central location?

Cost. The fiber cost of sending video back and forth.

With your setup, you’re just sending a few bits back and forth to do the monitoring and the control.

Correct. With the monitoring control, we’re doing like four or five hundred K in video monitoring and maybe half that in control. With centralcasting, you have dedicated fiber or large pipes of Internet going back and forth.

And if you have a hundred miles of fiber between locations, there may be three different people providing that fiber. And there’s a hundred miles where that fiber could get cut at any point and then three people to deal with to get it fixed if it does.

I’ve also been told that it devalues a station not to have its own master control.

Correct. If you want to sell the station, you would have to add that back in. With a centralcasting model, you really no longer have any control over your video. You basically pass through what you’re given.

Still, centralcasting must be tempting.

Yeah, there are some things we’re still exploring such as book and dub in the hub, centralizing the ingest when four or five spokes buy a hundred episodes of the Andy Griffith Show.

We could have one library with all the shows for the hub or maybe even the entire group. Each station could then request episode 101 and then we could send it via an FTP, satellite similar to Pathfire or something. We’re still exploring it, so we don’t have any hard facts yet.
User avatar
genlock
Moderator
Moderator
Posts: 5866
Joined: Fri Dec 21, 2001 4:09 pm
Location: OW

Post by genlock »

The way of the future.
Surprised that WVMH has not done this or complete centralcasting.
User avatar
genlock
Moderator
Moderator
Posts: 5866
Joined: Fri Dec 21, 2001 4:09 pm
Location: OW

Post by genlock »

This may be hard to do if WSAZ never bought a generator for the Huntington studio. In the past several years WSAZ has been impaired twice because of power problems and, If I am correct, never bought a generator. At least they didn't promote a new generator as "News Generator 3" or somesuch.
User avatar
Scott Reppert
Member
Member
Posts: 1442
Joined: Tue Dec 18, 2001 12:50 pm
Location: Fairmont, WV

Post by Scott Reppert »

Some of the rarest Hot Wheels of the mid-to-late 1980's had Gray Hubs.




Oh, sorry. Thought I was on the Diecast Diner website...
Scott Reppert
Music Director/Program Director/On-Air Personality
WTCS/WFGM/WMQC/WAIJ/WLIC/WRIJ/WKJL/WRWJ/WPCL/WWPN
Operations Manager: Hope Radio, T8WH, Palau
Production/Editor: "Believe Right" and "MFC WorldWide"
"For mine eyes have seen Thy salvation"--Luke 2:30
SPIKE NESMITH!
Moderator
Moderator
Posts: 718
Joined: Wed Oct 26, 2005 6:52 am
Location: away over here.
Contact:

Post by SPIKE NESMITH! »

So Waco is ahead you here in Tallahassee.
Me heap no understand, white man.

So what's the actual upshot of this? The article makes it sound all futuristic and spaceage, but what's *really* happening? Less jobs?
So sayeth His Royal Highness King Spike; greatest broadcasting talent of his generation.
User avatar
genlock
Moderator
Moderator
Posts: 5866
Joined: Fri Dec 21, 2001 4:09 pm
Location: OW

Post by genlock »

Traffic, traffic monitoring and some other "Business functions".
For a start. I assune they have bigger plans.
User avatar
Big Media
Member
Member
Posts: 2286
Joined: Fri Oct 14, 2005 12:46 pm
Location: Cruising I-64

Post by Big Media »

genlock wrote:Traffic, traffic monitoring and some other "Business functions".
For a start. I assune they have bigger plans.
Likely billing and AR.
Cameron
Member
Member
Posts: 887
Joined: Fri Aug 09, 2002 8:41 am
Location: Birmingham Ala-BAMA!
Contact:

Post by Cameron »

genlock wrote:This may be hard to do if WSAZ never bought a generator for the Huntington studio. In the past several years WSAZ has been impaired twice because of power problems and, If I am correct, never bought a generator. At least they didn't promote a new generator as "News Generator 3" or somesuch.
WSAZ Huntington has a generator.
It's that new, large, beige-thing between the back of the building and 5 1/2 alley.
------------------------
Cameron Smith - CSRE®
Senior Member - SBE 68 Birmingham
Senior Digital Product Manager - Hibbett Sports|City Gear
User avatar
genlock
Moderator
Moderator
Posts: 5866
Joined: Fri Dec 21, 2001 4:09 pm
Location: OW

Post by genlock »

About damn time.
User avatar
Ace Purple
Member
Member
Posts: 1050
Joined: Tue Dec 18, 2001 6:26 pm
Location: Nashville, TN
Contact:

Post by Ace Purple »

Glad to hear that there's finally a backup generator at WSAZ -- the one time we had an extended power outage on the overnight shift during my tenure there, it was incredibly tough getting the news on the air that morning.
On Twitter: @LouPickney
Post Reply