Advanced IT & Lower Bandwidth Costs Deliver New Operational Models for Centralization

At the end of the 1990s, centralized ownership and operation of station groups seemed a good way to reduce costs and leverage investment in master control automation systems. However, the anticipated savings in manpower were often negated by the high broadband costs at the time. Now that those have fallen significantly, station group and cable network owners are again looking at ways of enhancing profitability with centralization, inspired by the potential of more flexible and cost-effective operation based on new technologies.

The new potential for centralization arises from reduced costs in several key areas: the lower bandwidth rates of today’s market; improved compression technology, reducing file sizes and therefore bandwidth requirements; acceleration technologies that optimize bandwidth use for content transfer; and next-generation automation and transmission platforms.

There are now three models for centralization in place of the two pursued in the 90s, each offering its own advantages and disadvantages:

Central Acquisition & Playout • Dual Control In this operating model, all acquisition and playout takes place at the hub site, and there is dual control from both the hub and each spoke (station/channel). This theoretically offers the lowest capital cost since it allows sharing of both acquisition and playout systems among all channels at the central site. Depending on the scalability of the products selected for these systems, this benefit can mean significant capital cost saving, and can also provide lower-cost redundancy options using N+x architectures.

Local Acquisition & Playout • Dual Control This model places both acquisition and playout at each spoke site with dual control from both the hub and spokes. This offers the lowest potential operating cost since it requires no high-bandwidth communications for signal delivery or content file transfer. These two models both place acquisition and playout at the same site – necessary in the 90s because recorded content maintained on tape and played from VTRs or from robotic cart machines could not be quickly transferred from an acquisition site to a different playout site. With the move to file-based playout using video servers, it became possible to transfer content files on demand between sites via high-bandwidth communications links. This development gave rise to a third model:

Central Acquisition • Local Playout • Dual Control Acquisition takes place at the hub and ready-to-air content files are distributed via high-bandwidth links to each spoke as required for playout. Control can be shared between the hub and spokes, but the spokes are fully capable of continuing playout operations for extended periods (based on the local content storage capacity) without the support of the central site. In any centralization project, broadcasters have three main considerations: cost reduction (capital and operating); resilience, for continued local operation during outages of the hub; and simplicity of operation, including dual control, admin, operator training, maintenance and scalability. These considerations may assume different priorities for each individual broadcaster.

The simplest model – central acquisition and playout with dual control – offers the lowest capital and operating costs through the need for acquisition and playout capability at the hub only, but it provides no resilience unless a separate disaster recovery facility exists.

The local acquisition and playout with dual control option has the highest capital and acquisition costs, since it requires the investment in acquisition and playout systems at each spoke, together with the staffing to operate them, but it offers good resilience with the spokes able to continue operation in the long-term through outages at the hub.

The central acquisition, local playout, dual control model can often provide the best combination of operational benefits and cost. It offers some capital savings in making use of a central acquisition facility, and the consequent reduction in operating costs, for the same reason. It also offers some resilience, with the spokes able to continue transmission in the short-term with already received material if the hub becomes inoperative. However, the content file distribution process adds some complexity.

With MPEG-4 and VC-1 files being typically 50% smaller than the equivalent MPEG-2 files, transmission of encoded content files or transmission streams over broadband is much more efficient. Since prices for DS3 lines have fallen on average from $3-5,000 in the US to under $1,000, the high bandwidth component of centralization is now reduced by over 80%, making the first and third models much more cost-effective.

In addition to these substantially reduced bandwidth costs, the advent of the advanced IT-based automation and transmission platform has resulted in the potential for further significant cost savings in all three operating models, particularly in light of the dramatic reduction in proprietary hardware offered by software-based solutions.

Requiring only standard IT hardware and advanced software, OmniBus iTX is the most advanced IT-based platform available today. It provides a fully-featured solution that delivers uncompromised transmission chain functionality in a much more compact, cost-effective and energy-efficient package. For content acquisition and transmission, either at the hub or the spokes, the reduced cost and complexity of an IT-based system such as iTX shifts the balance of the centralization models. For example, the nominally lowest-cost traditional central acquisition and playout model with no resilience can be easily replaced with a far more cost-effective central acquisition–local playout solution providing much greater resilience and enhanced adaptability to each local site’s requirements for local content, news, commercials, and so on.

In the search for an effective model that will increase profitability in difficult market conditions, station group owners also need to consider the potential hidden costs of getting locked in by their choice of topology and technologies. Group ownership continues to be fluid, and broadcasters are constantly developing new services in response to demand and market opportunities. So a scalable and adaptable solution is the wise choice. It should be relatively easy and inexpensive to add new channels to an existing site, or to add a new site. The solution should make it easy to aggregate multiple central sites into one location or, conversely, to split a central site across more than one location. It should also be flexible enough to offer a centralized broadcast model an efficient way of protecting against long-term outages of the central site or any local site. And it should offer streamlined ways of delivering transmissions as streams for web or mobile delivery in parallel with broadcast delivery. By implementing a centralization model based on iTX, station group owners can achieve all of these things, and produce a quality of crafted output that matches and exceeds the best obtainable with conventional transmission infrastructure.

Click to read: white paper on Centralized Multi-Station Operation