ORLANDO, Fla.—I started my first TV job in 1985 in the Orlando market at WESH-TV, loading 2-inch carts into an ACR25 for commercial playout and news playback on ¾-inch tape. At the same time, Florical Systems released its first product, TimeShifter. Since then, I moved on to Betacart, live shot acquisition and master control while Florical stepped up the technology with ShowTimer and AirBoss.
Forty years later, we’re both still here—my employer, Hearst Television, which acquired WESH in 1998, operates 35 stations nationwide. Every day, we manage the flow of syndicated shows, network feeds, commercials and promos that need to reach the air without fail.
My current role is to make sure that content is prepared, validated and delivered to our stations in a way that is both reliable and efficient. Ingest and media asset management sit at the center of this process, and over the past two years, we’ve transformed how we handle them with Florical.
The Deployment
We began rolling out Florical’s ingest and asset management module in 2024 with the goal of creating a stronger foundation for how content enters our ecosystem—whether that content is coming in from distributors, agencies or internal production teams. By putting ingest and asset management in place first, we were able to establish group-wide consistency in how files are received, cataloged and validated.
Earlier this year, we completed the next phase of that transition, moving our stations onto Florical’s AirBoss automation for playout. Having the ingest and asset-management tools already in place made that transition much smoother, because the content feeding automation was already standardized and predictable.
Stephanie Sobiech, our content coordinator, is on the front line every day, handling program and promo distribution and working directly with incoming feeds from Pathfire, PitchBlue, Extreme Reach, OTSM and our networks. With Florical, she no longer has to manually track whether a file is complete or in the right format; the system validates incoming content automatically and flags any problems before they reach the air chain. That has freed her to focus on higher-level coordination instead of chasing technical errors.
Commercials and syndicated programming represent another critical part of our workflow, and Florical has helped us bring real efficiency to that process. At Hearst, we operate on a “touch-once, distribute-to-many” model.
A single program or commercial may need to be delivered to 25 stations, and Florical’s workflows allow us to handle that with economies of scale. The content is ingested and validated once, then mapped and distributed to all the stations that need it. Our dedicated commercial preparation and approval team depends on these workflows every day to ensure spots and shows are delivered consistently group-wide. Instead of repeating the same steps, they can focus on confirming the content is correct and ready, knowing the distribution piece is handled efficiently.
The benefits extend to housekeeping, as well. Because the system manages distribution centrally, we can avoid duplication and unnecessary storage at the station level. At the same time, archived content remains accessible through AWS, so if a station needs to pull material back, it can be retrieved quickly without adding complexity to the local workflow.
Error Reduction
Since completing the rollout, the biggest change I’ve seen is consistency across the group. Whether it’s Stephanie managing syndicated feeds, the commercial team approving spots or operators checking final playlists, everyone is working under the same ingest and distribution standards. We’ve reduced manual errors, shortened turnaround times and freed people to spend more energy on coordination and quality control rather than on chasing missing files.
Looking forward, the metadata foundation we’ve built with Florical puts us in a strong position for the next phase of automation. AI-assisted workflows that can reconcile traffic logs, detect anomalies, and even self-correct ingest issues will depend on having robust and consistent metadata. For us, that future starts with the reliability we’ve already gained from
Florical’s ingest and asset-management tools.
More information is available at www.florical.com.
