Young: Out With Old, In With New—Gear

After Young Broadcasting came out of bankruptcy in 2010, the new owners agreed that the 10-station group needed some serious renovation. They OK'd a major overhaul of news production that put all the stations in full-HD mode last year. Master control is getting the attention and dollars this year.

In charge of the managing the $25 million investment is Craig Porter, vice president of engineering. In this interview with TVNewsCheck, he talks about the new master control that is centralcasting-ready, explains how five HD studio cameras instead of three actually saves money and touches on other technology issues.

An edited transcript:

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What's the thinking behind the master control and asset management upgrade?

The file-based workflow is really the major component. At this point, most commercial distribution is done electronically, but as an industry we have really been pretty slow in terms of moving to take advantage of it. It’s kind of funny. We receive commercials as files and we play them back as files and we just seem to have a problem with the part in the middle.

So, what we were working on with Crispin and others is optimizing some of the components that allow you to basically take in file-based content and process it through the station all electronically without going through tapedecks or running switchers or any other equipment into the playback servers. What Crispin is doing is providing the pieces that really glue everything together.

What are those pieces?

They came out with a new piece that they call DTA, Digital Transfer Agent. It’s the brains of the operation. It’s basically interrogating all the different sources — all the stuff coming in — and providing the interface. Then, in our case, it’s actually running the transcoders. So, it’s taking whatever the file format is that the syndicator is delivering to us and transcoding that into the correct format for our playback systems.

A piece of media comes into the station through Pitch Blue, DG or one of the other delivery  services. Then, basically, Crispin recognizes that it's there and makes that available to traffic — Harris, in our case. They can access it on a Web-based browser and see if the content is there. They can look at it, preview it, mark the beginning frame, mark the end frame, give it a house ID number and say, "OK, I am done, send it to the server."

We are not just talking about commercial, right?

Right. It could be long-form, too. It could be ET or Dr. Phil or even network content if the network provides stuff to you in that delivery mode.

Because it’s a Web browser, you can access it from anywhere you want. So you can access it from the master control department; you can access it from the traffic department; you can access it from across the country if you want to do that.

So it provides a lot of efficiency in our workflow, but it also adds a lot of flexibility in terms of how companies decide to run their various operations. You know, LIN doesn’t operate the same way as Sinclair and it doesn’t operate the same way as Gannett. It’s a system that really provides a tremendous amount of flexibility.

What's your server platform?

They’re Omneon servers, but they could be whatever flavor you want. We just happen to use Omneons.

What’s the time frame for getting all this thing up and running?

The first of the nine stations starts at the end of February and the last station is done in June.

You have 10 stations. Which is left out?

KRON in San Francisco.

Once this system is in place, will you be able to centralcast?

It enables hub and spoke if they want to do that.

So, that’s just a choice of management.

That’s a management choice. The system is built to do that. For example, our station in Nashville [WKRN] can prep their material there or it can decide to do it at another station. This system permits that.

We have already set up our station in Sioux Falls, KELO, to do group monitoring. It can monitor all the stations during off hours or whenever the stations wants. The station can also do centralized control at any level the stations want. So you could do none or you could do it on the weekends if you want to do it. You could do it on the overnights. It really gives station management, both locally and at a the corporate level, a lot of flexibility in the way they operate their stations.

All 10 of your stations are news producing stations. How many are HD?

They all are.

Since when?

We did KWQC in Davenport, Iowa, in 2010 and then we did the rest of them last year.