A 13-year-old company that serves as a master control/disaster recovery hub for PBS stations says it has seen little financial impact from cuts to public broadcasting.
Executives from CentralCast Alliance, a company that got its initial investment from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting back in 2012, recently discussed the current status of the not-for-profit organization with TV Tech.
Syracuse, N.Y.-based CentralCast is a self-sustaining organization that serves more than 100 streams of public broadcasting channels to U.S. viewers.
“CentralCast started with eight New York PBS stations as a file-sharing mechanism and then it expanded from there to a joint master control to create efficiencies,” said Shadi Sabra, CEO of CentralCast Alliance. “And CPB back then said, ‘OK, we're gonna help you guys,’ and they matched whatever the New York stations invested in capital.
“Fast-forward to 2025, it's a whole different beast right now,” he added.
Streamline Operations
In CentralCast’s first year of operations, total revenue was less than $1 million; today, that has increased to almost $5 million with the expectation it will surpass $6 million within the next two years, according to the company.
When Sabra and CentralCast Chief Technology Officer Steve White joined the company near the end of the last decade, they both had one goal in mind.
“The first thing that we did was to streamline operations—all of it, from workflows, day-to-day operations, to technology to solutions,” Sabra said.
“As a startup, we didn't really know what direction we should be going in, so we pretty much went in any direction that a customer asked us,” White added.
In 2019, the company made a “massive investment” with broadcast tech provider Evertz, which had been a tech partner with CentralCast since its 2012 launch. “We upgraded almost everything when it comes to play out and automation, all of it,” White said. “And with the way CentralCast is structured, every penny of revenue that comes in goes back to R&D.”
In 2022, CentralCast LLC merged with Digital Convergence Alliance, a competitor serving Florida public broadcasters, to form CentralCast Alliance, a single major nonprofit entity built and designed specifically for public media. Its goal was to house more than 150 streams serving more than 50% of the entire U.S. public broadcasting audience.
Sabra said CentralCast wants to move from its current centralized “one-to-many” concept to a more molecular design, as spelled out in a white paper the company released in 2024.
“We want to change the model from one to many to kind to a more of a molecular design, where it's kind of ‘many to many,’” Sabra said. “So instead of having one hub and spokes, we want to have a core that is many hubs and the spokes around it.”
Second Hub Planned
To help achieve this, CentralCast plans to open a second site in the Northeast and to use the cloud to operate more efficiently. The new hub will have the same capabilities as the one in Syracuse and be close by for staff sharing. It will be IP-ready for ATSC 3.0 and 4K content distribution and will be able to house all 354 stations that are part of the CentralCast hub.
“We also want to minimize our hardware footprint and take advantage of the cloud, but at the same time make sure that the cost of doing so doesn't really change our service costs,” Sabra added.
Those costs include current annual fees of $40,000 per managed channel and $15,000 for pass-through channels, which is basically the national feed, but with the ability to do their own branding and EAS.
The company recently launched its next-generation service, called “Cast,” which takes advantage of advances in IP-based distribution.
“It basically delivers all the streams from the hub to the spoke hub over the public internet,” Sabra said, adding that the company deployed it to all of its customers free of charge.
“So now we have multiple layers of defense—at the hub, we have all the redundancies that we need,” he said. “We have the fiber delivery, and then we have the cloud bridge delivery, and then if all of those fail, we have the local disaster recovery system that we deploy to the stations on site.”
We didn't anticipate [the defunding] but we always planned for the worst, but hoped for the best.
“Cast is identical to our traditional solution, but, again, instead of no fiber, it's just an internet delivery,” Sabra added.
The new solution was deployed to their customers just prior to the 2025 NAB Show.
“We’ve essentially compressed an entire master control in nine rack units,” White said.
The company also restructured its fees. “Technically, a station can do all their master control and transmitter monitoring, all for $55,000 a year,” White said. “They don't have to worry about getting national content; they don't have to worry about integrating with the PBS interconnection system; they don't have to worry about all of those things.”
Planned for the Worst
Funding for public broadcasting has never been guaranteed and in the current political climate, the termination of funding for CPB earlier this year certainly raises questions about how PBS stations can operate more efficiently. Sabra believes CentralCast is in the best position to help.
“We didn't anticipate [the defunding] but we always planned for the worst, but hoped for the best,” Sabra said, adding that the development of Cast was a “direct response to the thought of federal funding going away.”
“And then for the current client list that we have, we started working with almost everyone about a year ago to figure out what is the best way to keep moving forward,” he said. “There are a few stations that changed their stream structure from managed to pass-through and some stations that sunsetted some of their subchannels.
“But all in all, knock on wood, we had a retention rate of 100% last year,” Sabra said, adding that he expects that to be the case for 2025 as well.
Sabra says the company is planning for westward expansion.
“We’ve located where the second site is going to be on the West Coast,” he said. “I’m not going to tell you that right now, but we are going to move automation into AWS with Evertz and the development for that has started. We're hoping that by late 2027, that will be online for us, which means that we won’t need automation at each site.”
