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Clear Channel has developed an operations center that can handle master control duties for multiple television stations in far-flung locations. Already handling those operations for three television stations coast to coast, the company plans to add a fourth by the end of this year and more next year. We talked with Clear Channel?s senior VP and director of engineering, Mike DeClue, along with Sonny Hollingshead, chief engineer/technology officer of the center in Tulsa, as well as Brian Coombs, chief developer of this technology. In part one, the three talk about the economies of scale achieved by this centralized system.
DMN: Gentlemen, we appreciate your taking the time to talk with us today. Our readers really do appreciate it, too. Can you tell us the headline of the story here? I understand you have a new TOC there in Tulsa for Clear Channel, right?
Hollingshead: Yes, we do. This has been in the works for some time. It?s part of a project we call C4, which basically is automation for television, for our stations. That?s how this all started.
DeClue: I would like to say that we?re the first, second-generation television automation implementation. We own Ackerly Broadcast. They were the ones who really pioneered the system that they called GCC back in the late 90s, really. It was 1998, 1999. We owe a debt of gratitude to those pioneers, but it also gives us an opportunity to really improve on that original design that came out, and to be able to take it to the next level of operational excellence.
DMN: What did the original design do and how did you improve on that?
DeClue: Well, the original design had a central hub that played out via basically fiber connections out to the edge stations.
DMN: How many edge stations are you talking about?
DeClue: In New York, I?m going to say seven or eight television stations. In California and Oregon, another seven or eight television stations.
DMN: That?s quite an operation. Now doesn?t Clear Channel have about 40 stations overall?
DeClue: We do.
DMN: How did you improve upon the original design? The original design sounds like it was feeding maybe 15 or 16 stations, right?
DeClue: That?s right.
DMN: How did you change that and improve upon it?
DeClue: It was basically the methodology that we used. We streamed the content from the hub out to the edge stations. It was basically a tape playback implementation, with some older kinds of automation. We have really selected and utilize the current version much closer to an IT-type of paradigm.
DMN: That?s a common thing happening these days, isn?t it?
DeClue: It absolutely is. There are really three kinds of implementations. There?s a stand-alone, where you can run the automation at the station. We can, in fact, and on occasion do stream content from the hub, the TOC, the Television Operations Center, out to the edge stations. The edge station has its own native ability to play back as well, and at times we will take a file from the TOC and send it as a file and put it onto a hard drive at the edge station for playback there. There are three kinds of operations: stand-alone, streamed operation, and remotely-controlled operation.
DMN: Help the readers get a handle on what it is you?re playing back here. Are you playing back network pass-through? Syndicated programming, commercials?
DeClue: That?s correct. And then there?s locally originated programming.
Hollingshead: For instance, the station in Bellingham, Washington is local for an hour and a half of news, and then they play back a half-hour of that newscast as well. For that, we give them control. We set it up to where there is control taken at their location in their NexGen system. They program it themselves for an hour and a half of local, live news. Then it comes seamlessly back to us at the end of that newscast.
DMN: It sounds like what you have is similar to a gigantic television station, where instead of having separate studios and control rooms, you have separate TV stations all connected to a central hub.
DeClue: That?s right. In essence, it is a virtual television station. Frankly, Sonny can run the TOC from his house. He probably has, I don?t know. [They laugh]
Hollingshead: That?s true. We can run remotely with the proper software. I could run the TV station from my house at this moment.
DMN: Sonny, is this a web-based interface that you use? How does that work?
Hollingshead: It?s web-based. It?s a system called NexGen that we?ve been able to aggregate from the radio side of Clear Channel. They?ve been able to successfully do this for years.
DeClue: Another party that we owe a deep debt of gratitude to is our radio brethren. You know, radio went through a whole period of consolidation, automation, and that was a period of consternation in there as well, with voice tracking and all those things. And so what we?re doing is we are in fact borrowing some of their technology. Obviously, we have to modify it because of the quantum increase in demand, the size of the files, the speed of playout of those kind of things, but basically we have a tried and true engine that we can attach to our needs, and that?s what we did.
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