Automation trends: Key developments for today and tomorrow
Jul 1, 2010 5:29 PM, By Phil Wilton
The demand for process improvement has pushed automation technologies to new limits.
New automation technology, such as Snell Morpheus, allows commercial playout during live broadcasts.
Though file-based transmission playout has been fundamental to the majority of broadcast platforms for years now, content aggregators that run such platforms are looking to achieve even greater efficiency in consolidating and operating multichannel playout operations. The demand for process improvement has been pushing automation technologies to new limits as broadcasters seek to leverage technology in more complex ways to meet their changing business, commercial and program-related needs. Automation vendors have responded through continual product enhancement and developments targeting broadcasters’ increasingly complicated operational requirements as they take on multiregion, multichannel broadcasting; preparation for 3-D broadcasting; and implementation of centralcasting models with hub-and-spoke sites.
Content providers worldwide are finding that their operational flexibility is being stretched daily, leading to a demand for more clever solutions that provide needed versatility in playout. This is particularly true when automated playout is combined with playout of live content. Commercial playout during live broadcasts is one key area in which broadcasters and their viewers are asking more of the automation system.
Optimizing manual intervention
As a rule, an automation system should be able to operate on its own 100 percent of the time. When manual operation is required, a good automation system supports rather than fights the operator. Broadcasters providing a significant amount of live programming should look for expanded automation feature sets that include commercial hot lists, which in turn give operators the ability to run select ad spots depending on the progress of a live broadcast event. In other words, an easily accessed GUI allows the operator to match ads to content on the fly. In the case of a football game or soccer match, this feature allows, for example, the operator to run the ad of a team sponsor in the break immediately following a touchdown or goal by that team.
Improvements to automation are also helping to simplify join-in-progress transitions from a live event that has overrun its time slot into a program already in progress. If a live game is running long and a film is set to start as part of a network feed, the broadcaster needs a way to preserve timing for all scheduled ad breaks. When broadcasts are spread across different regions and time zones, the management of this information becomes quite complicated. Understanding that broadcasters need a means of handling issues such as on-the-fly ad playout and management of program overruns in a multichannel, multiregion broadcast mode, automation vendors have focused on providing maximum flexibility and the optimal use of automation with the fewest operators.
Simplifying and saving with virtualization
Select up-to-date automation systems that are relevant with the latest IT technology can be hosted and operated in a virtualized environment in which the execution of applications is performed by virtual host servers using fewer machines. A traditionally architected automation solution can become quite hungry for server resources, requiring racks and racks of servers running just one application per machine. The virtualization model offers broadcasters significant benefits including much simpler updating and less costly maintenance; lower real estate, cooling and power requirements; and less hardware and fewer connections to manage. In addition to increasing efficiency across the board, virtualization supports the broadcaster’s “green” credentials, which are of growing importance in today’s business climate.
Virtualization software is engineered to provide a fully resilient architecture, with automated processes allowing the redundant part of the system to take over when and as needed. This characteristic ensures that there is no single point of failure and, in turn, no downtime that can lead to loss of revenue. As a software-based solution that is commercially available off the shelf, virtualization software is less expensive and easier to configure than hardware-hungry systems. Furthermore, virtualization is a technique that is not unique to the broadcast environment; it’s a proven IT concept that the latest automation systems are now applying to simplify operations and reduce operational costs.
Improving interoperability
Taking advantage of newer open standards, including the Broadcast Exchange Format (BXF), advanced automation systems now enable smoother interoperability across playout operations. (See Figure 1) The BXF open standard allows devices to exchange messages about media and metadata. With this capability, content management, traffic, scheduling, MAM databases and other critical workflow components use a shared standard for communications rather than a number of proprietary formats that must be translated, often in ways that limit system interoperability. Use of a native format gives broadcasters the ability to make changes in one system and see those changes reflected in an upstream or downstream system.
Figure 1. Relationship and use of BXF in the broadcast environment
In the case of automation with BXF support, the system can dynamically accept changes to the schedule as they are made in the traffic system. Likewise, changes made in playout can be reflected back to traffic. While these areas traditionally have operated separately, simpler communication with BXF messages brings key processes together and gives the broadcaster the agility to make better commercial and business decisions about content closer to air time and even to sell ad content right up until air time.
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