SOUTHWICK, Mass.—Hitachi Kokusai Electric Comark has announced that the WGBH has upgraded it VHF Band 1 Parallax liquid cooled DTV transmitter for up to 47.8kW of power.

Comark supplied the Parallax transmitter on channel D5 to public media producer GBH as part of the FCC repack. 

This transmitter system was purchased in 2018 as upgradable to allow for future power increases and initially delivered as a three-cabinet system with four power amplifiers (PA’s) per cabinet (12 total) for operation at 6.2kW transmitter output power (TPO).  

After a few years, GBH applied for and received authorization from the FCC to increase the station’s ERP from 6.7kW to 34kW to better serve their community of license. 

GBH then ordered the system upgrade package from Comark that included 24 additional amplifiers and the associated materials, providing TPO capability of up to 47.8kW.  The new configuration of the GBH transmitter now uses 12 PA’s per cabinet or 36 PA’s total. 

“When we originally ordered the Comark Parallax transmitter, our FCC engineering consultant informed us that there was a strong possibility we could be granted a future increase in effective radiated power up to 50Kw,” said GBH transmitter supervisor Jon Frank in a statement. “However, we had no idea precisely what that increased power figure would be. As result, we purchased the upgradeable cabinet option with our original transmitter.  When we were granted a 34 Kw ERP, Comark's modular transmitter design allowed us to easily increase the transmitter’s power output in the field and to purchase only as many amplifier modules and combiners as we required.”

“Planning is the key. We had a lot of very detailed customer discussions during the initial phases of this system,” explained Joe Turbolski, VP of sales and marketing at Comark. “GBH had a long-term plan for their post repack D5 allocation for this transmitter system.  With Parallax, we were able to offer both the technology and the architecture that GBH required to make this project successful.” 

BOSTON—Tech infrastructure company Public Media Group (PMG) announced a major step in preparing broadcasters for a NextGen TV future with the transfer of ownership of WGBH’s Public Media Management (PMM) cloud-based master control and content-sharing platform to PMG.

“As PMG works with public and commercial stations to evolve the industry to ATSC 3.0, we feel that PMM aligns perfectly with our infrastructure and will allow us to move swiftly in this next year,” said PMG CEO Joe Chinnici. 

WGBH, in partnership with Sony Electronics, created PMM. Launched in 2015, it provides master control and content-sharing for 18 public TV stations and two national programs.

Public Media Group, which acquired WGBH’s interests in PMM in late April, has along with Sony established PMM as a distinct legal entity, PMG said. With the change, the PMM Network Operations Center will transition from the Boston public broadcaster to PMG over the next few months. Stacey Decker, who pioneered the PMM service as CTO at WGBH, is serving as PMM president and CTO of PMG.

“PMM’s core structure is the perfect building block for NextGen TV. In the coming year we will add new capabilities to the platform in preparation for the ATSC 3.0 transition,” said Decker. “Moving forward, PMM will continue to evolve to serve the television industry by expanding its capabilities to create an efficient and capable platform that takes advantage of the many benefits ATSC 3.0 provides.”

A primary thrust of PMG is assisting broadcasters as they take advantage of ATSC 3.0 to boost audience and revenue. “Public Media Group is focused on expanding opportunities for the television industry by building and operating best-in-class technology platforms, including Single Frequency Networks (SFNs), digital infrastructure and edge data centers,” said Chinnici.

Recalling the “unique technology” created with Sony, WGBH President and CEO Jon Abbott said, “PMM has empowered public media to engage in new ways with their communities.”

“We’re proud to have nurtured its development at WGBH, and we’re excited to offer greater opportunity for the service to advance and further strengthen broadcasters as part of the vital and visionary work of PMG, under the continued direction of Stacey Decker,” he said.

Calling PMM “the most innovative hybrid cloud master control offering in the nation,” John Studdert, Sony vice president, media solutions, said the platform is “ideal” for enabling broadcasters to take advantage of what ATSC 3.0 offers. “We’re excited to take the next steps in growing PMM along with our new partner, Public Media Group,” he said.

More information is available on the PMG website. 

BOSTON—WGBH’s Alison Godburn is getting a new title, as the former senior director of Media Access Group is expanding her role to become the managing director for MAG and Public Media Management Technical Sales. In addition, MAG will now join WGBH’s technology and production group, which is led by the station’s Chief Technology Officer, Stacey Decker.

Godburn will take on a more client-facing role with PMM, a WGBH partnership with Sony Electronics on a centralized media management and content distribution service designed to give public TV stations tools to engage with communities. She will continue to serve as the lead for MAG as well.

Godburn has led MAG’s Boston and Los Angeles offices for the last seven years, helping with the mission to provide accessible media services to viewers who are blind, deaf, hard of hearing or visually impaired. She previously held executive positions in marketing and management with Coldwell Banker, Fidelity, The Boston Group, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts and the Arts and Business Council for Greater Boston.

“I’m delighted to bring my executive management and marketing experiences to this new role with PMM,” said Godburn. “I know that working together with public media leaders, we can use PMM’s powerful tools to create more vibrant stations. I look forward to building relationships with public media stations and helping them use PMM technology to streamline and strengthen their operations.”

Read Also: WGBH and Sony Partner on Cloud Workflow

BOSTON—Big Bird, Elmo, Cookie Monster, Oscar the Grouch and the rest of the Muppets have lived on “Sesame Street” for the past 50 years, teaching children—and even some adults—valuable lessons on things like spelling, math and social and cultural issues. However, unlike the memorable title song asks, you can’t actually get to Sesame Street. But if you head to Boston or Washington, D.C., you can find these classic episodes readily available.

As part of its 50th anniversary celebration, Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit education workshop behind “Sesame Street,” has donated nearly 4,500 digital copies of episodes from its run, from its premiere in 1969 to its most recent episodes, to the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, a collaboration between the Library of Congress and the WGBH Educational Foundation.

Though the episodes have already been digitized, the archiving of these episodes by the AAPB so that they can be around for generations to come is a diligent process.

According to Rachel Curtis, the digital project specialist at the Library of Congress’ Packard Campus in Culpeper, Va., and project coordinator for the AAPB, after Sesame Workshop digitizes the episodes in-house, they send them to her via hard drives in batches covering 10 seasons from the show each. The files from the most recent seasons are in HD, with earlier episodes in SD.

Curtis takes the original files and creates a lower resolution access file so they can be sent to WGBH. The Library of Congress uses its own Packard Campus Workflow Application to convert the files to MP4s with an H.264 codec. The SD episodes come out to a bitrate of about 711 kbps, while the HD episodes are 1.5 mbps. The process of creating an access file, per Curtis, takes about 15 minutes. Those files are then transferred to WGBH via FTP.

“The first batch we received I’m just about finished with my testing and making sure all my scripts are working,” says Curtis. “... [O]nce all the kinks are worked out, it should move pretty quickly.”

In addition, the original files from Sesame Workshop are ingested into the Library of Congress’ own archive so they are available there in perpetuity.

When the files arrive at WGBH that’s when Casey Davis Kaufman, associate director of the WGBH media library and project manager for the AAPB, takes over. Her first task is to ingest the metadata, which she says can take from a few hours to a couple of days depending on how it complies with WGBH’s data model. The files are ingested through a Hyrax Avalon archival management system (AMS) that supports public broadcasting metadata standards.

To be able to find the episodes in WGBH’s system, an API pulls the metadata through the station’s platform so that it is searchable by keyword or series title.

“Once we get the first batch delivered from Rachel, we will go ahead and ingest that batch and make it available on site,” says Kaufman. “We’re thinking within the next six to eight weeks the first batch will be available for anyone who visits the Library or WGBH.”

The “Sesame Street” episodes—which include classic moments like “Farewell, Mr. Hooper,” “Rubber Duckie, You’re the One,” “Near/Far,” and Cookie Monster’s Monsterpiece Theater—will join more than 100,000 digitized items that the AAPB has amassed since 2013. Among those is footage from the Senate Watergate hearings, more than 8,000 episodes of “PBS NewsHour” and raw interviews from numerous documentaries on topics that range from the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement. There is also archived materials from PBS’s predecessor, National Educational Television.

About 45,000 items from the archive are available to anyone throughout the country via AAPB’s online reading room. Though at this time, the “Sesame Street” collection will only be available by visiting the Library of Congress and by appointment at WGBH.

Here's a highlight reel of classic "Sesame Street" episodes that will be archived during this process:

Photos courtesy of Sesame Workshop

BOSTON—As one of the nation’s premier public broadcasters, Boston’s WGBH-TV has a strong legacy of programming that it has provided to PBS and other outlets for decades. From the classic children’s series “ZOOM” to “Masterpiece Theater,” “Nova” and “Antiques Roadshow,” WGBH has enriched the nation’s library of television programming since it first signed on the air more than 60 years ago.

That program library contains thousands of hours of film and video in a variety of formats that has become increasingly hard to manage over the years, according to Shane Miner, senior director of technical services, who joined WGBH four years ago. Problems such as increasing rates of ingest, manual processes, no digital rights and inadequate media asset management led the WGBH IT team to search for a better solution.

“When I started, I noticed what I thought was an inefficiency around our archives,” Miner said. “It was too manual and we were going to struggle to scale as both the amount and size of media increased. I felt like it wasn’t providing producers with what they needed to be able to meet their shorter deadlines and quicker turnarounds.”

Initially WGBH looked into a cloud-only solution but found that it didn’t meet their workflow requirements because of long download times and egress charges for video became too expensive.

MANAGING CONTENT

The key to managing and maximizing the full potential of WGBH’s vast archive could be summed up in one word: metadata, according to Miner. This led him to consider object storage as a hybrid solution that provides the best of both worlds between a NAS/SAN and all-cloud system.

“You can’t find any video unless you have a good metadata structure to be able to search, so the idea with object store is that you can marry the metadata to the video as a single discrete object that gives you a ‘self-describing’ video file,” Miner said

In addition to enhanced search and retrieval, other advantages to object storage is that it is limitlessly scalable, and can be deployed in an on-prem and cloud environment. In the end this reduces costs by reducing the amount of time staff has to deal with physical media, an important consideration for a public TV station with a limited budget.

WGBH stored a large amount of its programming on LTO and the time consumed in accessing physical tape was a big consideration in cost reductions, according to Miner. “It’s a much easier process when it comes to people time and energy,” he said. “We don’t have to plan large projects around the changeover [from physical media]. Definitely object storage locally with the second copy in the cloud is cheaper than what we looked at over many, many years than a traditional LTO solution.”

WGBH’s current setup includes 3 petabytes of on-prem storage occupying 15RU in a data center that reduced physical space by 90 percent when compared to its tape library. It uses AWS Glacier for cloud/DR and AWS S3 for extra capacity. On-prem object store is based on the Cloudian platform that provides for editing and archive curation. Final versions are stored in Sony Ci.

DO YOU NEED A MAM?

Using object store reduces the need for a media asset management system, Miner said. Whereas search in the traditional archive was limited to just what was in the archive, object store allows content to be searchable as soon as media enters the workflow.

“What we’re hoping to do with object store is actually break apart the MAM,” he said. “Because we can store the metadata directly on the objects and then use the file system to search, you actually don’t need a big heavyweight MAM to handle all the processes.”

When Miner and his team were looking at implementing this new storage system, the station was in the process of launching its Public Media Management cloud-based master control system. Since PMM targeted centralized master control, the model lended itself towards more cloud-only storage since PMM only handled finished shows, according to Miner. For archiving, however, the requirements were different.

[Read: WGBH And Sony Partner On Cloud Workflow]

“The problem we have with our actual archive is that for example, ‘Frontline’’s hour-long show generates hundreds of hours of footage so storing all of that content becomes costly and cumbersome in terms of pull down cost,” he said. “So as we looked at the full archive, we’ll use Sony’s Ci to store our finished program material [for PMM], but that’s such a small subset of the actual full archive that it’s much easier to manage. But the two systems [PMM and the archive] are pretty disparate; central master control has its own archive of broadcast material that specifically focuses on master control and nothing else and this archive is specifically focused on WGBH and nothing else.”

Using metadata as the driver of the transition not only helps reduce physical space and the time station staff need to retrieve content, it also gives producers more capabilities in handling content through the production workflow. When you have archives that stretch all the way back to early Julia Child film reels, this illustrates how the massive potential of metadata can be used to maximize the value of such legacy programming.

“We take our archive to be our mission element,” Miner said. “We believe that maintaining our archive is a public good and that’s something we should do because it’s essential to our mission.”

SOUTHWICK, MA—WGBH Educational Foundation has ordered two new VHF Parallax liquid cooled DTV transmitters from Hitachi Kokusai Electric Comark LLC for its WGBH Boston PBS station and the WGBY PBS station in Springfield, Mass. Both stations are in the process of a post-spectrum auction channel repack.

At WGBH, Comark will supply a multicabinet Parallax VHF band 1 liquid cooled transmitter on channel D5. The transmitter is designed for initial operation at 7.5kW TPO but allows for future power upgrades up to as high as 55kW should the station decide to maximize their ERP in the future. The transmitter cabinets will be pre-wired to facilitate a quick upgrade with additional power amplifiers and PA combiners.

In addition, Comark will supply another Parallax VHF band 3 transmitter on D13 for WGBY. The WGBY transmitter will be configured for 1+1 redundancy with a main/standby configuration. Each half of the transmitter can fully supply the required 13kW TPO with custom RF switching between transmitter cabinets. Both cabinets will be pre-wired to accommodate future power upgrades.

Comark will manage all aspects of both transmitter installations including program management, equipment delivery, on-site installation, and proof-of-performance testing. Both transmitters are fully upgradeable from ATSC 1.0 to ATSC 3.0 due in part the EXACT-V2 exciter technology.

[Read: Maryland Public TV Chooses Comark Parallax UHF TX]

“We expanded our Parallax product line from UHF to VHF band 3 and most recently to cover VHF Band 1” says Dick Fiore, President and CEO of Hitachi Kokusai Electric Comark, LLC. “WGBH/WGBY has been a long standing customer of Comark for many years, having previously purchased their original UHF DTV rigs from the transition from analog to digital. We are very pleased to be working again with WGBH Educational Foundation on this exciting project.”

“WGBH is looking forward to continuing our long relationship with Hitachi-Comark” says Emeric Feldmar, Director of Engineering at WGBH. “We have received excellent products, and support throughout the years. We purchased these Parallax VHF band 1 and band 3 transmitter systems for our WGBH and WGBY facilities that are being upgraded as a result of the spectrum auction/repack with capability to upgrade to ATSC 3.0.”

For more information on the repack, visit TV Technology's repack silo.

BOSTON—WGBH Television and Radio of Boston has installed Xytech’s MediaPulse Sky for facilities and asset management.

According to Erik Nordin, WGBH’s technical project manager, the PBS station decided it was time to take the next step in streamlining their facilities management capabilities, and chose to implement Xytech’s Media Pulse. As long-time Xytech Enterprise clients, they were particularly drawn to the software’s web-based Media Pulse Sky user interface, which offers a focus on mobile, with zero-touch deployment and no client installation, among other features.

WGBH also chose to deploy MediaPulse in its Creative department, an area requiring some of the same scheduling and billing needs, and worked with Xytech’s Director of Product Integration and Workflow Automation, Tanmay Goel, to customize the solution to their unique needs.

[Read: Xytech Powers Scheduling Logistics For NBC Olympics]

Using the MediaPulse Development Platform, Goel created a custom-configured front-end that allowed WGBH’s Creative users to raise requests that are automatically converted to MediaPulse Work Orders so the staff could schedule quickly and easily. The scheduled events are then seamlessly processed into invoices, significantly reducing the latency period.

“You can contemplate about your work, you can schedule it, you can create the items and deliver the invoices all at the user level,” Nordin said. “This enables us to move more quickly and efficiently as a business. We are also excited about completing development on the API and even more, including further linking it with our financial systems.” WGBH will use the MediaPulse Development Platform to take invoices and other financial transactions and post them into their station’s general ledger system.

At the 2018 NAB show, Xytech will be in booth SL4305 demonstrating its latest facilities management products, including its DASH subscription service, which is based on the Azure cloud platform. 

BURLINGTON, MASS.—Boston’s WGBH is continuing its relationship with Avid, announcing that it has once again invested in new offerings for the Avid MediaCentral Platform in an effort to make its media assets more available to production teams. The updated system helped modernize WGHB’s local news operation and created a new workflow for its national debate series, “Point Taken,” per Avid’s press release.

The new integrated system powered by MediaCentral has put the entire WGBH staff on the same platform. Avid equipment that came with the station’s new implementation includes the Avid MediaCentral | UX, Avid iNEWS, Avid shared storage, Avid Media Composer and Avid AirSpeed.

Following the installation of the new workflow with WGBH’s “Point Taken,” the broadcaster also plans to roll out a similar workflow for its regional program “High School Quiz Show.”

NILES, ILL.—Boston PBS station WGBH has a new remote studio at the Boston Public Library, and to help it deliver TV and radio signals to its main facility seven miles away, the station has acquired a fiber-transport caddie from Joseph Electronics. The custom transporter caddie allows WGBH to send bidirectional signals between the remote studio and main facility, including A/V, ancillary and data signals.

According to Emeric Feldmar, WGBH’s director of engineering, traditional microwave methods were not possible, the station needed a custom solution. As a result, WGBH relied on JE to provide a caddie that has full-duplex connectivity that allows operators to manage four cameras with full robotic control; two separate Gigabit Ethernet paths; return video and audio for PA, intercom, reference, and monitoring; GPIO; DMX lighting control; and all microphones for radio and television.

Joseph Electronics designs, manufactures and supplies custom fiber systems for broadcasters and system integrators.