The recent Sports Video Group Summit offered interesting sessions and meaningful opportunities for interaction, bringing together some of the most experienced and knowledgeable people from across sports production to share insights from a year that pushed the industry to innovate, iterate and rethink how things will be done for years to come. For me, five important themes emerged.

1.  Workflow changes and innovation have accelerated

COVID, and its health and safety concerns, are driving faster decision-making and innovation, and breaking down the resistance of those who normally resist change.

For example, REMI and at-home production models that keep the control room at headquarters, reducing staffing at event locales have been discussed for years. NBC tried portions of this as long ago as the 1996 Olympics. It’s amazing how long it’s taken for this to become standard operating procedure, but finally, there can be no doubt that it is a critical technique.

Virtually every major broadcaster and league reported that REMI became essential to their event coverage during 2020. Looking ahead, ESPN reported it will be 50% REMI for basketball coverage this upcoming season.

This trend extends to talent, too, with off-tube sportscasting looking prevalent not only today, but in the future. Several production teams reported that they are no longer having talent travel to stadiums, opting instead for announcers to call games from the safety of the studio or even their own homes.

We’re also seeing consolidation of content creation led by home game feeds that increasingly serve a broader role as “world feed.” No longer are we using two mobile units to create separate home and away broadcasts of one game. Instead, one control room produces generic game coverage. This reduces the number of staff on-site to help with health and safety, but also has significant implications for cost reduction. 

2.  Editing in the cloud works, and may be more efficient

Broadcasters including NBC Sports and ESPN reported that their entire edit staff now works from home. National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) reported a 100% productivity improvement, finding that editors freed of in-office distractions produce twice as much content.

Another broadcaster shifted their slo-mo EVS operators to work-from-home and found that one operator could now cover as many as three games in a day. Compare that with previous costs of traveling to a stadium where output might be one game in three days.  One production facility reported that they’d been able to convert “old edit rooms” (in use less than a year ago) into teleprompter and graphics facilities, reducing the number of people present in control rooms. 

3.  Sport requires fans

Industry leaders pointed back to early, pandemic-inhibited, televised sports events in 2020 such as Bundesliga, Germany’s premier football league, to highlight the importance of crowd noise and illustrate what an inferior experience it was to watch without the sound.

Virtually every subsequent sporting event has had some version of synthetic crowd noises. NFL Media even gathered NFL Films archive material so the sounds of each stadium would be authentic. The NBA thought crowd participation so important that it pumped virtual crowd noise into courts in Orlando to motivate the players.    

On the visual side, leagues experimented with virtual crowds. MLB increasingly filled its stands with cardboard cutouts purchased by adoring fans and used donations to support various charities.  Fox Sports for MLB, the Premier League and NBA all experimented with computer-generated virtual fans. 

4.  Latency matters 

Operations/engineering leaders challenged vendors to innovate and expressed the need for solutions to enable seamless storytelling. The “work-from-anywhere” dynamic is efficient and safe, but introduces latency and synchronization challenges.

These are magnified by the compression needed to connect with teammates and contributors over the internet. Latency above 300-350 milliseconds interferes with intimacy and inhibits peoples’ ability to interact naturally on air, yet several vendors spoke about systems introducing delays measured in seconds.

At the Transport roundtable panelists explored tradeoffs between low latency and high quality. Getting the story from a remote location, e.g., over LTE, often outweighed quality concerns, but the ideal is solutions with an immediate lag-free connection and high image quality. 

5.  Teamwork makes the dream work 

The changes above represent a tectonic shift in sports coverage, made more remarkable because they happened in less than one year.   Speakers addressed not only teamwork among their staff, but the unprecedented cooperation across leagues and networks.

The NFL Draft was one of the first major sporting events during the pandemic. Dave Shaw and his teammates spoke at length about the coordination that made it possible to shift the traditional in-person draft to a seamless virtual experience in just five weeks. He credited the enormous teamwork of the league, NFL Network, ESPN, ABC, D-TAGs and the three key remote vendors (including my own, the VCC) to make it possible. 

It became very clear that these changes are not temporary. Instead, they are the start of an exciting, interesting future. Josh Stinehour and Joe Zaller of Devoncroft Partners reported that industry economics have shifted significantly as the cost savings from diversely located, IP-based production have established a new baseline for budgets and operations.

They believe that more innovations will be needed and expected to get the industry back to profitability. They cited the example of TV Globo, which is no longer enhancing or building control rooms to support tier 2 or tier 3 events. Of nearly 3,000 sports games per year, they have transitioned to cloud-based systems to handle more than 1,000 of them.  

I’ve been fortunate through my work with the VCC to have a front-row seat to the innovative efforts of NFL Network, Turner, Fox Sports, Sinclair and WWE this year. The SVG event pulled the camera back even farther, spotlighting remarkable achievements and collaboration across the entire production industry. I’m excited and fascinated to see what is ahead and wish all of you a healthy holiday season and upcoming year.

Larry Thaler is CEO of The Video Call Center. 

“It is not strange...to mistake change for progress.” -Millard Fillmore

I’d like to turn the clock back more than 70 years to 1948, when the first live television remotes began. They were enabled by microwave transmissions and initially used just for parades and specials. Microwave became the every-day solution for remote news and sports programming by the early 1970s.

Shortly thereafter, new technologies—first analog satellite newsgathering in the late 70s, followed by digital SNG and microwave transmissions—provided greater access and significantly higher quality while using bandwidth more efficiently.

While I am not one who pines for the past, I believe we lost something important along the way. With this technological progress came the curse of latency, which has cost TV its intimacy. In today’s content landscape where authenticity is prized by a demanding audience, delays are not free. The price is a high one that we cannot afford to continue to pay. Let me explain.

THE DOOR TO DELAY

One advantage of those early remotes was that they were analog and not subject to any meaningful delays. A correspondent’s or a sportscaster’s report would be beamed to the studio at the speed of light, where it would be switched, released over the television transmitter and sent back for the contributor to view immediately on an off-air monitor. They were instantly and intimately connected to the discussion with the studio.

As time marched forward and digital improved, correspondents in the field were forced by a technology-induced delay to depend upon an audio-only mix-minus IFB (interrupted fold back). They could hear, but not see the people they were communicating with, robbing them of subtle, but vital visual cues from their studio counterparts. Later HDTV and digital television transmission added further delay, rendering the possibility of the off-air real-time monitor a thing of the past.

Since the door to delay had already been opened, it was just business as usual when new compression algorithms were used to squeeze a full broadcast-quality signal onto a couple of cell signals. Bonded cellular was remarkable in that it allowed crews to contribute with only a backpack of equipment, freeing them to make reports from more locations, at a dramatically lower cost. No need for trucks! The trade-off was even more latency, this time, significantly magnifying the delay in the reporter's path back to the studio.

The visual impact was dramatic and remains today in that all too familiar scene of reporters foolishly nodding their collective heads, sometimes at painfully inappropriate moments. Effectively, the studio is taking the heavily delayed remote feeds seconds before the beginning of reporters reply. The “yada, yada, yadas” that Jerry Seinfeld so aptly described have become an inescapable part of every-day broadcasts.

LOSING THE BACK AND FORTH

I am no Luddite. I have spent decades optimizing signal paths, sometimes obsessing over hundredths of milliseconds, while always embracing the forward march of technology. But I am troubled by our acceptance of that loss of intimacy. Producers are taught to bring the viewer into the story; to make them part of the family. When a reporter in the field and their anchor communicate instantly, their banter adds life and energy to the story. This only works when they are present in the moment in a way that lets the viewer witness the dynamics of their interpersonal relationships.

We’ve lost the back and forth of real conversation. The relationship between today’s remote and host is as cold as a factory—one person on an assembly line handing off the widget to the next worker. It’s mechanical, contrived, distracting and harms the relationships between the host and reporters while alienating the audience. Worst of all, it is totally unnecessary.

Audiences are attracted to stories and engaging casts. We should be smart enough to recognize the value inherent in delivering that experience. We can recapture that lost intimacy and rivet the viewer to the screen not only with the story but with the people behind the story.

The combination of high bandwidth IP everywhere and mobile devices with remarkable processors and built-in cameras and screens can replace traditional equipment while changing everything. High-quality, low-cost, two-way visual communication between host and remote opens up totally new, dynamic ways of telling a story. A reporter on location can share the emotion of the moment with the anchor and the audience. A sportscaster on the sidelines can narrate over B-roll, or even do play by plays remotely. Existing technologies can provide two-way hyper-low latency between studio and field, making it possible to recapture lost intimacy and inspire new forms of storytelling.

Real progress means we can have it all!

Want to dig into this some more? Join me in Las Vegas at NAB, on April 9 at 9 a.m. in room N258 in the LVCC where I’ll be speaking on this in detail at "Beyond Bonded Cellular; A Workflow for Broadcast Remotes via Smartphone." Hope to see you there.

Larry Thaler is the president of Positive Flux, a consulting firm that specializes in helping media companies take advantage of the rapid changes occurring in the industry. He can be reached viaTV Technology.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. — Arthur C. Clarke

Sometimes the news is so big, a guy has to stop what he’s doing and write an article for his favorite technology magazine. Such an event happened the other day with Intel’s announcement of the Neural Compute Stick 2. It’s a full capability artificial intelligence and vision processing device in a USB stick. I’m a pragmatic guy who is always thinking about what will be in the future, but with this announcement, the future’s arriving a little sooner than I had planned. It’s time to think about the impact on the broadcast industry and what we can prototype, RIGHT NOW.

To be sure, AI of this horsepower, about 4 teraflops/second (which I am guessing is smarter than a mosquito, but not as intelligent as a flounder), has been with us for a while and has been available through the cloud (think Amazon Alexa or Siri). This isn’t even Intel’s first neural network stick. But the addition of vision processing with this level of capability and without an internet connection means it can be used in real-time applications. And at just $99 each, every device will soon have the capabilities of being “smart.”

So what will this change? The short answer is ... just about everything. But readers of this article want to know how this will affect TV production and consumption. So here are some predictions:

Smart Brilliant TVs Will Know Us.

It won’t take long for the CES guys to pick up on this. Finding the right content to watch is hard and getting harder. I’ve observed for a while that trying to find a good film to watch across your cable, Netflix and HBO subscriptions is futile. The next step is for TVs to know exactly who is in the room and to recommend choices for us. Perhaps the television has a personality and participates in the debate. The set will get real-time feedback on the choices from all of us based upon our body language — improving the accuracy of recommendations over time. Whoever owns this algorithm is going to have a lot of influence. AI in the set can put this power back in the CE manufacturers’ laps.

Cameras Will See Things We Don’t

All the way on the other end of the signal path, cameras will get a lot smarter. Remember those old analog “skin tone color correction” circuits to smooth out wrinkles? Well, of course they went digital years ago, but what happens when they’re smart and driven by a neural network? Live de-aging correction is possible. Barbara Walters would be soooo jealous. It does not take much imagination to see that live replacement of an actor’s image with an avatar would open new doors for the effects industry to work their magic in live, more interactive ways.

Without a doubt, autofocus will now be able to anticipate the subject. Pan, tilt and zoom controls will follow the action and frame automatically, perhaps even mimicking a particular cinematographer’s style. It’s not a leap to say that robotic cameras will soon become self-driving. Ross, Vitec? Are you paying attention?

Compression

There’s no doubt these cost-effective, local, massively parallel processors will be used to create new compression algorithms. With computer vision, we can dedicate bits to only the most important parts of the image and create an architecture totally different than what we use now. I wonder who will do it first, how much latency there will be, and whether we’ll still owe royalties to MPEG-LA.

A Helpful Hand In Editing

Editing is akin to storytelling and therefore a creative art — but AI can help by organizing clips automatically based upon who is in them and create automated logs. The user interface may change to support gestures and voice control (no more carpal tunnel or backaches!). Perhaps the editing device itself might even learn the style of the editor and begin a rough-cut on their behalf.

Real-Time Automated Captioning

Silicon-based captioning solutions have been making steady progress in reaching the accuracy levels of their carbon-based competitors for prerecorded files. With localized AI, real-time live closed-captioning with acceptable accuracy should be a slam dunk. While we’re at it, let’s use the video recognition to automate VDS (Video Descriptive Service). Heck, all of this could move into the set-top box or even the TV for use on demand, and spare the broadcaster the cost of doing it at all. Let’s go one step further and add real-time translation into any language, executed in the TV, at the request of the viewer.

I’m Sorry, Dave, I’m Afraid I Can’t Do That

This exciting news is especially fitting on the week when Douglas Rain passed away. For those who did not catch the news, Rain played the voice of HAL 9000, the sinister AI computer in “2001 a Space Odyssey,” as well as a much more helpful sidekick in “2010: The Year We Make Contact.” So in one lifetime, we’ve gone from imagining pervasive artificial intelligence to making it available for under $100. Arthur C. Clarke would sum it up nicely, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

[Want more information like this? Subscribe to our newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox.]

I watched some amazing fireworks this past Fourth of July weekend, with powerful rockets screaming skyward to burst among the clouds and fantastic fountains erupting brilliantly at ground level. After the excitement, I found myself musing on the show’s parallel to the question of whether it is better to transcode in the cloud or to use on-premise servers. People want to understand how cloud-based transcoding might benefit their business. Do we even need on-premise transcoding anymore?

The truth is that you can’t discuss transcoding without considering the workflow around it. Let’s start with two basic definitions:

1. Transcoding is the adaption of a media file from one format to another: converting a 1080i file to 720p or Avid DNxHD to H.264 web-compatible format, changing the bit rate, or making numerous other changes needed to deliver content to a particular platform.

2. Workflow is the path content takes between creation and delivery. A workflow can include manual processes such as Standards & Practices, machine-automated processes such as quality control, and, yes, transcoding.

In other words, transcoding is just one activity within the overall journey we call a “workflow.” What happens upstream and downstream of transcoding matters. We are really asking about content operations, which come in two flavors: Production Content that is in the process of being created and Distribution Content that is relatively complete but needs to be adapted for one or more distribution platforms.

Production content is the “raw material” of the production factory, from a YouTube producer creating a workout video to a broadcast newsroom creating this evening’s newscast. Transcoding may be needed to bring in external content (such as from a news-wire service, archive or external library) or to share content between departments running different systems (such as production and promotions departments). Production content workflows tend to be heavily time-dependent, frequently operate on smaller files and typically require very few destination formats and variations.

Distribution content is the finished goods that need to be packaged for delivery. The destination could be a network’s master control, iTunes, Roku, SVOD or any other distribution path. It tends to be longer in duration, although it may also include commercials and promos, and generally requires conversion into significantly more formats and varieties.

With all that in mind, let’s re-ask the question: cloud-based or on-premise transcoding? The answer often comes down to three simple factors:

TIME

Transcoding large files can take significant time; uploading large files to the cloud, potentially even longer. If the delivery need is measured in minutes, as is frequently required with production operations, it’s unlikely cloud services will reliably meet that demand. If the need is measured in days, which is normal in distribution operations, the cloud becomes a more realistic option.

Internet connection speed also greatly affects time. Just comparing one recent Positive Flux client with a 100Gig internet backbone and another with only 200Mb, the client with the faster pipe was far better positioned to utilize cloud services for a wider variety of services. 

DISTANCE

A widely-dispersed team whose members need to operate on the content at the same time could benefit from a cloud-based solution, if it has the workflow tools they need. For them, the “time cost” of bringing content to the cloud is offset by the benefits in freedom of location.

If the content is destined for multiple off-site locations, then time spent to upload it into the cloud is not wasted. In fact, it has the effect of moving the content closer to all its destinations and potentially reducing the number of uploads to just one. We can then leverage cloud-based workflows and transcoding to deliver the many variations to the different destinations. 

If the content is only destined for an in-house master control facility, then cloud-based operations make less sense. Why go to the cloud only to return to the same starting point?

MONEY

Moving transcoding and workflow operations to the cloud trades capital investment for operational cost. Cloud-based operations could help avoid buying some servers and software licenses, or building a data room or complex networks, but careful financial modeling and good estimates of content volumes are critical. The pay-as-you-go model might help with cash-flow, but those with higher volumes may find themselves penalized. Cost calculations need to include upload, storage, transcode operations, and other processing and delivery charges from the cloud service provider. It is also important to amortize the incremental internet service used to and manage content operations.

On-premise solutions provide an all-you-can-eat solution with fixed pricing that should be easier to budget. Licenses can be used for years, although they incur annual support fees. Right-sizing is critical here: buy too many licenses and engines sit idle; buy too few and content piles up like flights into O’Hare. In our practice, 4,000 one-hour transcodes per year is the rule-of-thumb for the economic break-even point for one server.

People ask if there are maintenance or IT cost savings associated with using cloud services. It seems like this should be the case, but the reality is that web services need to be managed and monitored just like local servers. Companies find themselves needing the same size team either way.

WHY NOT HAVE IT ALL?

For many workflows, the decision of where to perform transcoding is not an A/B choice. One of the cloud’s many advantages is its elasticity. It’s easy to spin up additional transcode engines in the cloud when a big job comes through or when many projects need to be accomplished at the same time. Although on-premises solutions do not offer this capability today, it’s conceivable that on-premise technology providers could soon provide the same elasticity, providing a hybrid on-site licensing/virtualization model or hybrid onsite/cloud service, which would manage the flow of content and scale on demand.

Like the fireworks, perhaps the best show of all ties together earth-bound launch platforms and cloud-based firepower.

Share your experiences in deciding to cloud or not to cloud media workflow operations in the comments.

Larry Thaler is the President of Positive Flux, a consulting firm that specializes in helping media companies take advantage of the rapid changes occurring in the industry. He can be reached via TV Technology.

There are some who say, and I believe them, that this is the golden age of content. There are more fabulous, smash hit new Broadway musicals than I can remember in my lifetime. Networks, cable channels, and over the top services are delivering new and innovative content all the time. Consumers have instant, easy access to nearly all of this content and significant pockets of it are extremely good. Sure there’s also more useless stuff than ever before too, but the viscosity that held the cream on the bottom of the glass is disappearing.

To top all this off, interesting new platforms are being created for content producers to create and distribute their wares. YouTube, Facebook Live, Snap News, Instagram and Twitter are all highly accessible distribution platforms. It’s true that so far it has been really hard to make money on these platforms, but that hasn’t stopped a number of folks from dedicating their waking hours and their livelihood to creating content and building audiences in the hundreds of thousands or even millions.

What differentiates recent online content is that much of the content starts out as live and that is a significant issue and one the creators may not be entirely prepared to manage.

I’ve been around production for my whole life and live content is a special breed. There’s nothing quite like being in a live network control room when some 30 million people are tuned in. There’s an energy and adrenaline rush that’s almost addictive. The programming can be more exciting and organic. It’s often more credible and timely than the pre-recorded versions. Those characteristics are part of their appeal on new, socially-driven platforms.

But, there is risk. From the earliest days of blogging and social media chat, there have been issues brought before the courts. It’s a complicated legal area. There is no reason to expect this won’t bleed over to live streaming. As Facebook quickly learned during 2016 when dozens of acts of violence crossed its “airwaves,” live content can go very wrong. Perhaps less extreme, but on live TV there’s always the chance that some wardrobe malfunction will occur or some artist will test the limits of their middle finger or their mouth. There’s risk of libel. For this reason, many shows on more traditional distribution platforms run the show through a delay box (take WWE Raw for example). The steady finger of a lawyerly censor type is always poised at the ready to defocus or silence the nasty parts.

Why do broadcasters do this? Historically, it was mostly to protect FCC licenses—those fines can really rack up. But there was a larger, unspoken reason; reputational risk. There is a line between being edgy and pushing audiences into boycotting a show. 

Social media platforms that are valuable for distribution can also instantly become a wellspring of pressure from the advertising base. The live interactivity with the audience means the chat thread alongside a livestream can become a torrent of negativity. Celebrities and brands can be quick to react with punitive action when they are inadvertently aligned with something that makes them uncomfortable. The recent flight of Disney and others from internet sensation PewDiePie is just one example of how things can quickly go awry. No producer wants to be dealing with dialing down anger from his or her audience.

These new platforms also change who is a broadcaster. As leading brands move from quick streams to more program-style offerings online, they want to know that their brand is being protected. In addition to simply looking for audience size, they’ll be turning to professionals who can deliver infrastructure and production professionalism to the medium, while maintaining the perceived spontaneity and casualness that makes internet culture so resonate with target demographics. Rest assured, they will be holding their professional broadcast and production partners responsible when trouble ensues.

We don’t have the FCC licenses on the internet, but the distribution platforms are not blind to the risks. Picture your live stream with a flasher or an errant finger, and then enjoy these few snippets that might put your hard-gained distribution at risk and set your standards and practices senses tingling:

· “You will not post content that: is hate speech, threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.” Facebook terms.

· “You will not post content that contains pornography, graphic violence, threats, hate speech, or incitements to violence.” Snap terms

· “You may not post violent, nude, partially nude, discriminatory, unlawful, infringing, hateful, pornographic or sexually suggestive photos or other content via the Service.” Instagram terms

There’s no FCC policeman to keep livestreams in check with standards and practices. For many in this space, the cost of full time lawyerly oversight is prohibitive. But, the risks are real. The revenues may not be as great right now, but for some people it’s their entire income. For many companies the allure of generating live content is outweighed by the risk of something going wrong. That is, of course, until something impacts their brand. Sponsors care, more than you can imagine, and will pull out before you can say “Bill O’Reilly.”

So, you read it here first. The days are coming when the internet needs new live television censoring systems. However, we cannot do things at web scale by applying broadcast economics. When programmers are struggling to make money on-line, adding bodies and costly tech is really out of the question. We need to think about the problem in a different way and find a modern approach to the solution.

Much, much more on this to follow…

(PS. I’ll be talking about this and other issues related to turning the 3 Billion Smartphones into compelling and economical points of content acquisition at NAB 2017, Tuesday April 25th at 2:30PM PT in the Debate Theatre, Booth SU10404.)

NEW YORK—I recently attended a meeting, held in a conference room dedicated to Chester Floyd Carlson. It’s unlikely that you ever heard of him, but he changed your life. His invention is perhaps third behind only the printing press and the Internet in its revolutionary impact on communication.

Chester Floyd Carlson with an early prototype of his Xerox machine. (Photo credit: Xerox Historical Archives)

Carlson was the inventor of the dry photocopy process, which led directly to the development of the Xerox machine. Like so many others, his invention was driven by personal need. An inventor turned patent office attorney, Carlson was burdened by the difficulty involved in using carbon paper to make the many manual copies that the patent office required.

Carlson patented his process, but it took 10 years before the world woke up. No one could think beyond the carbon paper approach—after all, why would an electronic device that only made one copy at a time be needed? Besides, when multiple copies were needed the tried and true wet mimeograph process was already available.

Between 1939 and 1944, Carlson was turned down by more than 20 major entities including behemoths like IBM, GE, Eastman-Kodak, and the Navy. It wasn’t until 1946 that the owners of Haloid Photographic Company saw its potential and 1949 when the term “Xerox” was created and the invention finally began to be commercialized. Eventually, Chester Floyd Carlson became one of the richest men in America.

RIGHT UNDER OUR NOSES?

The key point here is that the world took 10 years to recognize that photocopying could be valuable to investors and 20 years to make it commercially useful. As I stared at Carlson’s name I wondered—what are the Xerox machines of today? More specifically, what opportunities are right under the noses of broadcasters and other media people that would change the world if seen properly.

I had one sitting in my pocket.

The mobile smartphone has already changed the world, and it is changing our industry, by disentangling consumers from their TVs and cable boxes. But rarely do we talk about how this device might be used to change the way television is created—how content is brought in. Most are just tipping their toes into the transformative value this device could have.

I think we need to open our eyes a bit wider. This is a challenging time. Ours is a world of fragmented marketplaces. New media companies struggle to make a dollar on the internet, while old media companies are squeezed between lower viewership, older demographics, higher production costs and cord-cutters dropping their cable subscriptions. 

Consider just one scenario: news gathering. A typical remote from a foreign land is created by harnessing a camera crew, satellite uplink, hundreds of dollars of satellite time, plus a transmission engineer to book and check the feed. The results are usually a one-way signal with significant latency. Cellular bonding solutions are relatively less expensive and more mobile than satellite, but are still quite costly, do not support real-time return video, and extensive encoding delays cause the reporter to nod while the anchor’s question is being asked. I dare you to try having a back-and-forth conversation between a reporter and a studio using either of these choices. 

SMARTPHONES THE KEY TO BROADCAST’S FUTURE?

There are already 2.5 billion smartphones in the world powered by more than 1.5 billion 4G LTE connections—and that is expected to rise to half of all people on the planet by the early 2020s. A smartphone can make a video call without downloading an application with very small latency, from anywhere on the planet, virtually for free. Best of all, there is an immediate, real-time return video channel.

Sure, some will say that the video quality of these services can vary and when you first try them, the connections can sometimes be iffy. I say, so what? The same can be said of the original video tape machine and dozens of other technologies that were adopted by news at early stages. There are ways to improve the reliability and such benefits are already achievable with only a small drop in image quality. 

Moreover, with billions of users, the scale of development is immense. Does anyone doubt that the reliability will improve? What if instead of three live feeds in a newscast, one could have 40, or 1,000? That’s contribution on an unprecedented, almost unimagined scale. Mobile’s pervasiveness, low latency, return video, and vanishingly low cost could be used to create an entirely new type of program.

Penetration of smartphones for the highly desirable demographic 18-34 year olds is at 92 percent. This generation likes to see themselves as part of the conversation (I call them the “selfie generation”). Perhaps a new type of program using their live video would socially engage the audience and make them active participants through their smartphones.

Investing time today in exploring the new boundaries of newsgathering, social interaction and new programs enabled by this new form of communication could help engage and focus an audience, provide a lead or differentiation over a competitor, improve workflows, enhance productivity and reduce costs. Better yet, those who step up now get to help define how the technology will be used for the industry to follow.

There are smartphones today with 4K cameras. 5G will arrive in a few years. At some point everyone will be making television like this. Why wait? Are you willing to miss the next Xerox machine? 

Ask yourself, “What would Chester Floyd Carlson say?”

Larry Thaler is the President of Positive Flux, a consulting firm that specializes in helping media companies take advantage of the rapid changes occurring in the industry.He can be reached via TV Technology.

NEW YORK—You could not turn on the business news channels in the past month without hearing that wages have finally started to rise. In the next breath, you’ll learn about the growing divergence between employee earnings and business profit in the U.S. and across the world. Everyone has their own theory about this “productivity gap,” which is attributed to many things including retiring baby boomers, lack of capital investment, or maybe just too many people off enjoying their summer vacations.

In the media space the gap between what it costs to make a program and the number of viewers for that program, and thus its monetization potential, has been growing for a very long time. As an example; as far back as 2007, around the days of the writer’s guild strike, we saw NBC, under its GE management, try to reduce the cost of the 8 P.M. primetime lineup by embracing non-scripted. Company management has been feeling this pinch for quite awhile.

HEAD SCRATCHER

I am lucky that I get the opportunity to visit many TV stations and cable production facilities, but cannot help but notice that layoffs in these businesses are continuing as ratings continually inch lower. Often these staff reductions are not accompanied by process improvement or capital investment, and I am left scratching my head. In other words, media companies continue to squeeze the stone harder in hopes of getting more water from it. As employees struggle to keep up as they absorb the workload of their departed brethren, you have to wonder where we are headed. 

I am not an economist, but I believe that there are additional pressures affecting media companies that serve to amplify the general lack of productivity seen in the economy at-large. The rise of smartphones and social media means more than employees having interesting, non-work things to do during their idle moments. These additional platforms are an added challenge for media companies who must deliver content to these new outlets. That’s additional work just to hang onto existing viewers without adding to revenue or creating new lines of growth. Examine Disney’s recent whopper of an investment in MLBAM and you can see the pressure acting on organizations to find efficient and profitable ways to embrace over the top delivery. Draw this trend line out and you can see that as an industry our productivity, and therefore our potential for profit growth, is clearly in trouble.

What’s a media business to do? Invest more in innovation, of course!

CONSOLIDATE, INNOVATE

We’ve already seen facilities transition to nonlinear editing, add robotics to their studios and switcher automation to their control rooms. We’ve seen consolidated master controls and remote transmitter monitoring. These innovations, when properly staffed, create productivity improvements and enhance bottom line profits. Once this playbook is complete, however, where does a media business turn for next year’s productivity growth?

Here are some ideas:

·Study your operation: Manufacturing firms have been studying their own operations, investing in lean manufacturing and just-in-time-delivery for years, yet many broadcasters fear those tools as anathema to the creative process. They largely are still staffing productions the way they did 20 years ago. Many companies are afraid to take an honest look at where the waste is (hint, it’s not only in the operations teams). Process analysis can often reveal “hidden factories” where work is being done, but not falling effectively to the bottom line.

·Enhance CMS: Content management systems (CMS) permit more efficient use of assets across platforms. Improving content management systems can boost creative collaboration and more effective use of content resources—not only across platforms, but as an enhancer to the creation of new and unique content. Tools exist, located either on premises, or in the cloud to leverage your assets to the myriad of platforms you face.

·New, Unique Programming: It’s remarkable that even with these new platforms that there is a dearth of new innovative programming. There is latent expertise in many teams right now, outside of the core business and hidden from sight, that is waiting to get out. Tools now exist to create new, low-cost forms of programming related to those areas of excellence with just a small team. How much of your program schedule is filled with direct response ads? Instead, use these times to experiment with highly social programming that directly engages and expands audiences.

·Push the Envelope: Continually look at innovation in the production process. When I was at NBC, there was a big push for “one-man-bands” (field crew of one tech, plus producer and reporter). Is it time for “no-man-bands” where the reporter-producer calls in on their smartphone for certain stories?

·Go Green: Often spoken about, but rarely acted upon—reduce the power draw of equipment. Reduce and virtualize servers, remove outdated equipment and reduce power consumption and heat-loads. One project we’re associated with has removed half (yes, 50 percent) of their equipment racks. How many people have had the guts to remove those old tape machines from the edit rooms? Lower power use equals higher productivity.

Lower productivity levels do not need to be the norm. They are what happens to an industry experiencing the seismic shift of Internet-driven disintermediation and the paralysis that comes with sudden change. For anyone thinking they can keep business and technical models the same over the next few years, I’d strongly recommend reading that old goody, Spencer Johnson’s “Who Moved my Cheese?”

Innovation and productivity begins with programming and connecting with audiences, and require an environment where risk is okay. Lack of innovation and standing still might actually be a greater risk than change. Examine your organization’s culture. How many organizations are taking the risks they need to evolve and grow?

Larry is the president of Positive Flux, a media consulting firm. He can be reached via TV Technology.

NEW YORK—In my many years at the Peacock network, and during my subsequent consulting career, I witnessed a great number of reorganizations. During the early GE/NBC years they were happening so frequently that the HR teams did not even have time to make new org charts. One enterprising junior person created what became their semi-world famous “Plan 9 from Outer Space” (named after the 1959 sci-fi horror film). I believe it went through 17 editions, but always ended up being eerily accurate.

Inevitably, these reorgs were always about saving money, but one theme seemed to permeate them—the need to centralize, or later, decentralize, services and accountability. The centralize camp always argued “economy of scale” and “accountability!” The decentralize factions argued for “more accountability to the customer!” The result of this push-pull would be a seemingly endless cycle of centralization then decentralization (on a personal note, I lived through three round trips—the next one is free!).

PROCESS OVER RESULTS?
One thing I never saw was the benefit of these cycles. Centralization carries the potential for process consistency, which brings with it the possibilities of enhanced reliability, lower costs, or even outsourcing. Centralized teams tend to be very good at adhering to rules and measuring their own outcomes. In these days of industrial espionage, hacking, and denial of service attacks, a centralized security team is critical to the operation of many companies. We would not, for example, want to see significant firewall policy changes without a security review. On the downside, centralized organizations tend to reward process over results, making it easy for them to be disconnected from the company’s final product. One thing is clear: organizations that are 100 percent centralized tend to become process bound and impossible to work with.

Television is a creative medium. Decentralization enables operational elements to foster closer ties to the actual air product. That’s why production teams are generally assigned by show, not as a central pool. It encourages investment in changes that will improve the experience for the consumer. Yet while putting responsibility closer to the edge enhances innovation and creative risk taking, it can sometimes create the appearance of a wild-west mentality or result in duplication of efforts, things that are typically anathema to corporate thinking. In addition, cross-business efforts become more challenging under a decentralized approach since there is little incentive or momentum to encourage pollination.

CROSS FUNCTIONAL KNOWLEDGE
Why do I bring up these lovely memories now? Nostalgia? Not really. Since leaving NBC, I’ve worked with dozens of organizations who all struggle with this balance. Last October, I wrote about the need for technical organizations to think of IP as a tool and not a department. Engineering teams must have cross functional knowledge to be able to execute in today’s multi-distribution, IP routing world. This is of significant importance now as we embrace the trends of content on demand and network-based infrastructures.

I’ve seen centralized network teams who act like stern guardians at the gate barring entry to anything that looks suspiciously like forward progress. TV stations and departments are unable to execute on creative ideas because their hands are tied by centralized bureaucrats. Yet I’ve also seen great centralized teams that are sympathetic and supportive to the needs of the divisions they serve. Sometimes this comes down to good staffing—just the right people in just the right places. More often it is the result of intelligent process that systemically encourages responsiveness under the dictates of a well thought out SLA (Service Level Agreement). 

So, without further ado, here are Thaler’s five laws of centralization for broadcast production:

1.Only centralize what can be measured;

2.Never centralize administration when the opportunity exists to disburse responsibility with an enforceable policy;

3.Centralized organizations must be accountable to the divisions they serve. If they think of the divisions as customers, then they’ve got the right mentality; 

4.SLAs: if the defined Service Level (response time) is not good enough to support live broadcast, you should rethink centralizing the service, or improve the SLA;

5.and finally, Any centralized process that is unreasonable or unaccountable will eventually be subverted.

The simple fact is that the best solution is not centralization or decentralization, but rather well thought out organization that balances the need to create efficiencies with the needs to support innovation and a creative environment. The move to the IP/UHDTV/OTT future is a unique opportunity to rethink our assumptions and achieve the correct balance.

Larry Thaler is the president of Positive Flux, a New York-based media consulting firm.

NEW YORK—Five years ago, my very first blog entry explored how cloud-based asset management might change television production. Now, on the heels of NAB 2016, it’s a great time to revisit this topic.

You could not attend the NAB show without being blown over by the exploding number of purported solutions for content creation and distribution operations in the cloud: content storage, collaborative editing and graphics creation, traffic, play-out, and even switcher control panels connected via IP back to their mainframes at headquarters. It is becoming possible to have the entire process, short of the camera itself, somewhere other than where the talent is.

This raises the question of why we build facilities in the first place? Since their inception, both content creation and distribution have been done by teams of co-located people in control rooms, traffic operations and master control. These teams function under tight deadlines, where immediate communication is critical to success. Aptly named control rooms keep people working together to ensure that programs are coherent and become a product the organization can be proud of.

Now, with pervasive broadband and cloud services, an editor in LA could easily be working on tonight’s episode of “Jimmy Fallon,” while it is being shot in NY. It is possible for people to collaborate instantly on content irrespective of physical location. Businesses can engage the right contributors, based on price, talent, availability, and other considerations.

Yet, I can’t help but find it ironic that I am writing these words immediately after leaving a conference where thousands of my peers came together. There is still power in face-to-face communications. There is a reason why a company like Google, which knows more about enabling people to work remotely than almost any company on the planet, continues to build large offices. Water-cooler conversations and chance encounters with people outside their collaborative circle foster innovation.

As counterpoint, while at NAB I had a great discussion with one of the largest U.S. media companies, which has done more to push content operations into the cloud than anyone else I know. In fact, all of this company’s multi-platform, international distribution systems are now cloud-based. When I expressed that I was under the impression that cloud storage costs were a significant barrier to cloud implementations, the response surprised me: with storage costs coming down dramatically, their highest costs, in fact, are in taking content out of the cloud. That suggests that it may now be time to do as much in the cloud as possible and to keep it there for as long as possible.

What this all suggests is that designs for the next generation of production facilities must strike a balance between, on one hand, the benefits of co-location and face-to-face communication, and, on the other hand, the advantages of cloud-services, a remote workforce, talent-on-demand, and multi-platform distribution.

A facility designer today faces formidable considerations:

• Construct offices or desks for each worker, or push for a location-free workforce and provide shared-transient work zones for personnel only when they need to be in the building?
• Develop on-premises data centers, or minimize these and push everything possible to the cloud?
• Plan for content to be orchestrated in a live control room or utilize just-in-time automated assembly from segments as required?
• Embrace IP for video/audio routing, accepting the higher costs, immature standards and likely timeline risk, in order to set the facility up for deeper integration with cloud services? Or be branded a cost-conscious Luddite by building an SDI-based facility?
• Develop operational and support organizations based upon these new technologies, and deal with the inevitable Game of Thrones that will be initiated, or keep organization structures intact, but never fully embrace the benefits of the technology?
• And lastly–financially capitalize the equipment and control the business’ destiny for economic life, or focus on SaaS (Software as a Service) and be subject to the whims of the marketplace?

The choices aren’t black and white. It’s likely that hybrid approaches driven by cost, time, freedom to think out of the box, and company culture, will make each facility unique in some way. It seems to me, however, that a media business will be something else entirely by the time a building being contemplated today is completed in a couple of years. Therefore it behooves us to find optimal answers to these questions, right now, before shovels go in the ground.

NEW YORK—You would need a crystal ball to see what the FCC has in mind with its recent 3-2 vote to proceed with the chairman’s #unlockthebox proposal. Certainly the words in this proposal have just the right feel-good tone, with lots of focus on consumer choice and promoting innovation. We’re all consumers, after all. Who doesn’t want to think that someone in Washington is going to bat for the little guy?

RJ-11 (photo credit: ecx.images-amazon.com)

But when the cable networks argue that the FCC is looking backwards, I find it hard not to agree. Let’s start by examining the Chairman’s faulty comparison between today’s cable service and the old days of telephone service. The transition to store bought, third-party telephones that was facilitated when the FCC mandated support for third party devices was beneficial to consumers and their wallets, but the phone companies were left with the wire to your house and no control over anything past that point. That moment was the effective end of innovation on the telephone network--and who could blame the phone companies? In the name of standardization the FCC (to a large extent following court rulings) put a stake in the ground in 1976 and Ma Bell never progressed beyond voice-only solutions.

Well, there was one notable beneficial exception. The FCC chose the lowly RJ-11 as the “registered jack” point of demarcation. This simple device that permitted consumers to plug any device into the network paved the way for the plug-in, store-bought, computer modem to replace the acoustically coupled ones being used up to that time. This innovation undoubtedly helped lead to AOL and widespread use of the Internet. Of course, that glory has long been supplanted by the cable modem. More on that later.

With its position on set top boxes, the FCC is again driving a stake in the ground that may foster short-term innovation and lower rental fees, but the obsolescence of that stake is already written on the wall.

The FCC is specifying a magic box, a complicated spin on the RJ-11 type of universal interconnect. The objective is for this box to connect to the cable company’s video-over-QAM network and convert the output to IP. Maybe this would even be built into the cable modem. The theory is that this would permit new, innovative, store-bought devices to plug into this adapter while permitting, in fact encouraging, the cable companies to keep their old networks unchanged. Long live QAM!

The misstep here is that unlike the old telephone company, the business of cable providers is not built around their wire. It’s the interface on the STB that is their storefront; a portal the cable companies have created through which they directly engage the consumer and upsell VOD and other services. By demanding that these systems support third party boxes, the Chairman is expecting the cable companies to let go of the consumer experience upon which for better or worse they have built their businesses. No wonder the cable companies object!

Practically speaking, by the time the standards under discussion are firmed up and pass the inevitable lawsuits that will be thrown in their path, they will be obsolete. They are halfway there already.

This is not to suggest that the FCC doesn’t have a role in helping consumers by improving the quality of their experience. It’s just that the solution being offered is too late and too small. The FCC only sees two objectives: the political challenge to encourage more competition in the MVPD space, and the technical challenge to drive innovation in the consumer experience.

By focusing on the STB, the FCC is taking a pass on the obvious, bigger need for more competition in the broadband space. Real progress and lasting innovation in the telephone industry didn’t spring from the RJ-11 connector. What the FCC eventually got right was another 20 years down the road when legislation forced the Baby Bells to open their networks to competitors. When competitors gained access to the networks we saw meaningful, new technologies like SIP and VOIP that presented customers with choice.

Likewise, the new universal adapter being proposed will not be the thing people fondly look back on. The FCC should be maneuvering for real broadband choice for consumers. Most U.S. consumers have one or at best two choices for broadband. Their broadband provider holds all the cards. That needs to change if there is to be meaningful competition. In Europe, governments require that companies that own pipes lease space in their pipes to rival companies. In the U.S. the places with the best service exist where the cities and towns own the pipes and lease them to third parties. If we have true competition in how the IP signal gets to the consumer, the MVPDs will be forced to innovate and TV over QAM will fade away.

That doesn’t mean the cable industry is out of options. Current IP hardware is light years beyond the cable box at a fraction of the cost of renting an STB. Heck, my 10-year-old TiVo exceeds anything I’ve seen in a cable STB. But MVPDs are getting smarter. They know their video services are at risk and that fact is driving innovation such as Charter and Time Warner’s recent adoption of Roku as an IP STB.

We should applaud the FCC for taking some action, but at the same time realize that we don’t have another 20 years to fix the real problem. At the end of the day, if the FCC is serious it needs to focus on bigger issues. Making broadband, not STBs, more competitive will create a landscape with real consumer choice. Make that happen and the closed MVPD delivery system will die of natural causes and drive innovation as MVPDs innovate to survive.

NEW YORK—On any given day, I encounter some version of truly remarkable statistics about the rise of video on-demand as a percentage of the total amount of viewing. At the recent NextTV Summit ,Jay Samit of Seachange proclaimed that 50 percent of all U.S. viewing is now on-demand.

Perhaps more sobering and relevant to broadcasters is this from Needham: revenue paid to U.S. TV content companies per person per hour is $0.30 by the linear TV ecosystem, $0.11 by Netflix globally, $0.03 by YouTube.

These numbers are important when we consider the increasing price content producers are paying to support other platforms. The companies producing content for these multiple viewing streams face a growing challenge in the form of operational costs.

What I found most compelling was subsequent discussion at NextTV that swirled around the fact that the effort of meeting the vast number of permutations needed to support on-demand was absorbing a rapidly increasing amount of the finite resources of production departments. For someone who worries about budgets and workflows, this is something worth digging into, especially when on-demand revenue remains starkly lower than linear. It suggests imbalance between resource expenditure and return.

ADAPTING TO ON-DEMAND OFFERINGS
This is a tricky thing. There is a lot of pressure to expand on-demand offerings. I believe the solution to maintaining balance is not so much a technology challenge, but rather a need to be more prepared to operate the content business with a nonlinear mindset. Take one example; I recently watched as an experience team at a well established TV broadcast company struggled with closed captioning. Closed captioning! This is something that had been essentially solved for decades.

Why did they struggle? It was not for lack of technology, lack of intelligence, or lack of skill. The simple truth is that their recent-vintage workflows were founded in the not at all distant past on linear principles of live production. The workflow for closed captions in linear does not readily translate to a nonlinear production model. Edit a linear file and your CC no longer matches.

The challenge is that the team is being asked to deliver the same show, intact and with all its features, from within a linear workflow but packaged for on-demand viewing. The solutions for serving the nonlinear demand had been grafted on to that linear base. Their people have not generally dealt with both. Live has been linear and post-produced shows have been nonlinear.

Not everyone will encounter this particular issue. Some vendors have built a feature into recent versions of their edit products that solve this issue, although it is by no means commonplace. Many, if not most, broadcasters will at some point encounter a problem of this type at some point in the near future.

MANAGING CHANGE
The issue is not one of technology. What is missing is operational leadership. Producers, control room crews, editors, talent, and engineers are really good at doing the same routine everyday, but less effective at managing change. Nor is it reasonable to expect them to. What’s needed is someone with the vision to aggregate all the requirements—both today’s and tomorrow’s—and then put operational processes in-place to support them. Content producers need to be more productive with the resources they have in order for the balance sheet to make sense.

Businesses thrive on predictability. Therefore they fail to designate or hire operational management. This deficiency significantly impacts the ability for the company to respond to change and anticipate new requirements in a shifting landscape.

When you build a business expecting things to pretty much be the same each day, you don’t feel compelled to pay for a “change management” specialist.

But that’s the catch. In this new environment, businesses should be looking to make change all the time. The drain on production resources caused by the need to support a shifting landscape of delivery formats reflects a need for greater operational efficiency and productivity. All those formats are an expensive proposition, but with some organization and pre-planning, processes can be consolidated so that supporting new flavors doesn’t have to mean more work.The opportunity to change is ever-present if a business is willing to look for it. New markets, smoother operations, enhanced productivity are the keys to maintaining and growing today’s media business. You simply cannot get there without change-agents pushing for those benefits.

Managing this change and maximizing productivity requires someone with a foot in both the steady linear and shifting nonlinear domains. Whether you call it an operational manager or a change manager, hire the person to your staff or retain an outside expert, having someone keeping an eye on your production balance will be essential to maintaining your bottom line balance. 

NEW YORK—Sometimes too much of a good thing is not a good thing. My wife and I recently wanted to watch a movie when we found ourselves with about two hours between car pool sessions. I was interested in action or comedy, she wanted a drama or perhaps something we had missed in the theaters. We’re fortunate to be blessed with a wealth of choices: HBOGo, Netflix and Amazon Prime accounts, not to mention our Fios on Demand subscription.

The result of all those options? It took us more than 45 minutes to pick our movie (“Sleeping with the Enemy” with Julia Roberts). The protracted search effort ate into our limited viewing window. Instead of a relaxed experience we had to pause for car-pool duty, spoiling whatever mood this decidedly non-romantic thriller might have presented. 

“Why isn’t this easier?” 

Not unexpectedly, I am not the only one with this question. At the recent Next:TV Summit it was apparent that the debate about the future of television is still raging. There was one near universal point of agreement among the many speakers and guests at the conference and it was that the filter is definitely “broken,” as pointed out by Clay Shirky of NYU as far back as 2008.

I agree. In fact, I suspect that we binge view content simply because good content is so hard to find. When we find something at all palatable, we cling to it like a life raft for as long as possible.

Yes, Netflix has its recommendation engine. HBO's EVP of technology and chief digital officer Diane Tryneski says one is on the way for HBOGo. Each of those are fine, but neither solution addresses the scenario that my wife and I, as well as millions of others, experience daily: there’s no holistic way of searching across services. 

A killer app would know what cable and OTT service I subscribe to, learn over time what I like and make recommendations which align with my tastes, mood, or other conditions. Ideally such an app would allow me to express interest in a movie currently in theaters too, then alert me when it becomes available on one of my services.

From the consumer’s perspective, it is almost astounding that this does not yet exist. For a more business-minded perspective, consider Jonathan Martaugh. The head of film & television for Facebook/Instagram, two companies that have more insight into what makes their audiences tick than just about anyone, expressed to the Next:TV Summit audience that content discovery may be the single biggest opportunity in TV.

IS APPLE TV THE ANSWER?
So is Apple TV the end of television as we know it or just one more set top box like all the others? 

Erik Schwartz of BitTorrent TV cut through the noise for me through his experience with an early development Apple TV box. He explained, “it’s all about the apps.” His team was able to port his company’s iOS app to Apple TV in just one day. There are huge numbers of programmers and code libraries out there. No one should underestimate the number of third party apps that will quickly be available or the impact they will have on viewers.

Apple TV provides the best opportunity yet for someone to aggregate the huge number of choices available to a consumer and provide a unified and personalized search tool. Better yet, it could easily work across TV, Mobile and the Web. But Apple is not alone.

CHANGE IS COMING
The set top box is still king of linear TV. Given options however, consumers may look more closely at their bills, especially when 30 percent of a typical cable bill can be equipment fees. With cord cutters and programmers both applying pressure to the MVPDs, how long can this last?

Many MVPDs are beginning to realize that their SVOD content should be delivered via IP. Charter clearly gets this, as reflected with their recent announcement of a Roku app. This permits a convergence of head-end equipment for both SVOD and mobile users. I believe this change is just beginning.

ALL YOU GOTTA DO IS…
If we were to accept that the IP-based, application-rich device is the set top box of the future, it would not take a huge leap to envision someone coming out with the magic cross-platform search app. A company needs a user authentication system which identifies the subscribed-to services, a powerful robot scraping the available content from the myriad of providers, a recommendation engine, and some APIs to link to the content providers. Then tie the whole thing up in a cool interface via an elegant app that works on a set top box and mobile phones. Not simple, but easier than returning a stranded astronaut from Mars. 

The app need not natively play the content. It would be sufficient to point to content and to know when the play is done. Asking after the play how the content matched the user expectations would provide critical knowledge about users and their habits. That is valuable data in the TV business. How valuable? At Next:TV there was significant discussion about using such information as currency in the distribution economy. 

Attempts are already under way. NextGuide has an app that combines knowledge of linear MVPD offerings with some over the top content. Google is working on a new interface for Chromecast which should enhance navigation. Both Rovi and Watchmi are working on discovery apps for MVPDs, although one has to wonder what business case convinces an MSO to send viewers to competing OTT content? Watchmi says it is targeted advertising. 

That’s going to take some convincing, but the dangers of not taking action are quickly becoming perilous. One thing is certain: content discovery is clearly the next frontier, so as they used to say, “stay tuned.”

‘Engagement’ is a key watchword for media businesses. Shows are trying to outdo each other with on-screen tweets, Orange rooms, lower third crawls and Facebook pages. We are desperate to create opportunities for our audiences to engage with our programs by contributing pithy commentary and parrot hashtags via social media related to the topic of the moment.

Desperate is an apt term. As we watch the breadth of media stocks miss their numbers this quarter, one has to wonder if we are doing enough. I don’t think we are.

NO NEW CONTENT

What seems odd to me is that while all this effort is put into social dialogue, little or no effort is put into creating actual content to capture and hold an engaged, younger, social media-aware audience. The airwaves fill with costly, syndicated content that does nothing to reinforce the connection between the station and its community. At the same time, audiences are fragmented and tuned out. They’ve abandoned local stations for their DVRs and streaming services, ignoring the local scene all together. Cable companies are similarly pressed to attract viewers.

I’ve long been baffled by the lack of local production at TV stations and cable networks beyond news and public affairs. When the news ends, stations turn out the lights, studios sit empty, and control rooms gather dust. I’d have assumed by now that in the drive to innovate and capture audience, someone would have tried to create a local game show, local sports coverage or talker that would engage younger viewers and give them a reason to take another look, or increasingly even a first look, at the ‘old media.’

When I’ve asked general managers to explain this lack, their quick answer is that local productions are too expensive. How can that be? Is it really more viable to leave a huge capital investment in infrastructure lying fallow while the station’s brand dies during quiet times?

'Love at First Skype' is an example of a new breed of live television. It uses Video Call Center technology that was developed for use in co-productions for broadcast and cable television networks and stations.

I’m not suggesting that local programs would be free. Of course there would be costs in terms of staff and the cost of promotion, but the opportunity for capturing a new, untapped audience should at least be worth a look. New technology solutions for remote control, high quality video call-ins, and even remote hosting mean stations have economical options for producing live, local conten 

What makes local news work and the reason it continues to ring the cash registers for hundreds of stations, after all, is its immediate relevance to the community. I think there is a tremendous opportunity out there for local stations to capture young viewers. I think the biggest obstacle is one of mindset. Local stations today think of themselves solely as local programmers with local advertisers and local competitors. Outside of news, they’ve completely ceded the role of content creator.

ENGAGING ENTERTAINMENT

Today’s emergent audiences are specifically looking for engagement with their entertainment, hence the popularity of services like Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, SnapChat, as well as interactivity-driven ‘channels’ such as gaming network Twitch. Local producers can embrace this ethos. Outstanding local programming such as call-in talk shows with a focus on a particular niche can deliver the engagement stations crave. Done well such programming even creates an opportunity for local stations to syndicate content themselves or expand their audience virally using OTT distribution direct to the consumer. It is even possible to grow local, non-news talent into regional and national figures. Imagine what could be done with a polished studio, a skilled host, and modern technologies.

Fortunately there are innovators who are waking up to the opportunity:

• CBS launched ‘Upstate Sports Edge’ featuring hyper-local coverage of local high-school and college level sports on Monday, Aug. 31.
• The Video Call Center has begun creating compelling, DVR-resistant live, interactive talk television. Its unique format features callers dialing in via video calling such as Skype and the entire show is controlled by the on-air host with no control room. It’s now offering its innovative technology to TV and cable channels to create their own programming. 
• We are starting to see personalized news options that know the viewer. Think of it as a hybrid of your newscast with a social media-style “like” button. It’s early days, but to get a sense of what is possible take a look at http://watchup.com/ or http://www.reuters.tv/.

If we want to see this business grow, we’ll need to dust off the cobwebs of TV creativity and create our own opportunities. It is time for local stations to recapture what they do best, engaging a local audience.