Several groups have undertaken large-scale digitization efforts to tackle the problem, with some exploring new AI and ML (machine learning) tools to more efficiently tag and index video. Regardless of the method, generating accurate metadata is key to any archive efforts, both for old content and fresh material being created today, said broadcasters last week at TVNewsCheck’s NewsTECHForum in New York City.

Metadata’s Critical Role

“Before we can actually monetize the archives in a reasonable way, we have to have metadata on it,” said Mike Palmer, AVP, advanced technology/media management for Sinclair. “And in many cases, most cases, we have not been putting good metadata on it.”

Palmer, speaking on the panel “Harvesting the Archive for New Content and Opportunities” moderated by this reporter, said archive metadata must not only include enough information to find content using a media asset management (MAM) system. It also needs to have information about the rights attached to the content, since most call-letter stations have a mix of content they shot themselves, and fully own the rights to, and derivative content originally sourced from a network news service.

There isn’t any technical means today to tell whether a station owns a piece of content or not, Palmer said. That question can usually be answered only by calling and (hopefully) finding an employee who was there when it first aired.

“How long have we been talking about archives and metadata, but we’re not bringing back basic information about ownership, what camera it was shot on, the date, the geolocation, all this metadata that is in the cameras that we should be carrying forward,” Palmer said. “And we’re recreating the same problem that we’re trying to solve today with AI and ML because we’re simply not putting the right metadata on that content as it moves into the archive.”

Palmer said the culprit for lost camera metadata is often nonlinear editing systems that strip it out during the production process. To combat the problem going forward he sees a solution in the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) standard, as promoted by the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI). C2PA specifies provenance metadata that survives all the way from camera to distribution. C2PA not only addresses content ownership, but also content authenticity, an issue of growing importance in the age of AI-generated fake images.

‘A Wildly Human Process’

To improve accessibility of content for its journalists and producers, Hearst Television began digitizing the archives across its stations in 2021. To date it has digitized about 20%-25% of its archive material, representing roughly 45,000 hours of video.

“We parachute into a couple of stations at a time and help them digitize their archives in a systematic way,” said Devon Armijo, director, digital news integration for Hearst Television. “We bring in archival staff that handles not only the physical media but also the paper data that associates with it. Not only do we focus on digitization, but they also are not only tagging. They are looking at it in a discovery way. making sure they’re telling about the editorial opportunities, the promotional opportunities and sometimes the sales opportunities that are there in the archives — things that are sealed in the tapes that folks may know or not know that they have.”

While Hearst makes some use of automation, Armijo said that digitization remains “a wildly human process,” particularly when dealing with physical media that is beyond its end of life, such as 40-50 year-old tapes. That is where Hearst’s archivists serve as “the first line of defense.”

“They’re putting tapes through on a daily basis and making so many human decisions, up front at the beginning of digitization, that helps you with any sort of automation that rolls through afterwards,” Armijo said. “We had some automation processes throughout, like black [frame] detection. But that stuff is all secondary to the human decisions, the conversations, and understanding the history of not only the station but the content that’s there in your archive.”

Hearst licenses archive content to third parties, Armijo said, but the group itself remains “our first customer.” So far this year, Hearst has used its archive to produce over 370 pieces of digital original content along with a handful of linear specials and some local streaming content, including the popular true crime series Hometown Tragedy.

Fox is digitizing the archives across its station group as well as Fox News and Fox Business and bringing them into cloud storage. It has taken a different approach than Hearst by outsourcing the work, which encompasses tens of thousands of U-matic, one-inch and two-inch tapes, 16mm and 35mm film and various digital tape formats.

“We have tractor trailers come and pick up the entire library and it goes off to one of our five digitizing vendors, and then it works through their process,” said Ben Ramos, VP, Fox Archive, field and emerging tech, Fox News. “They have around 35 metadata enhancers who watch every frame of it, and kind of tag it as they’re going through it. It’s very manual, we haven’t gotten to too many AI/ML tools yet.”

Fox’s first goal was to preserve “at-risk” content like one-inch, two-inch and U-matic libraries, with the second objective being to generate ROI by licensing content to third-party documentary filmmakers. The initial effort was aimed at 5,000 U-matic tapes.

“What do we have in there, what’s the failure rate, and can we find ROI?” Ramos said. “We found ROI within six months, so that kind of supercharged the process, and then we got to do the rest of the 70,000 U-matic, two-inch and one-inch, and then we started dipping into the more expensive 16mm.”

Fox has experienced a failure rate of 3%-5% on that older content, and those impaired assets are now sitting on two pallets “awaiting further remediation,” Ramos said. That could involve baking them for several weeks to remove moisture, or even cracking tapes open to clean them and rehouse them.

Overall, it is a slow process, and so far, Fox has only digitized about 8% or 9% of its total physical media assets. One of the surprising findings is that newer formats like Beta, DV and DVCPRO tapes are also experiencing similar 3%-5% failure rates during the digitization process, and some of the older one-inch and U-matic tapes are actually playing better depending on how and where they were stored.

“Now everything feels a little bit at risk,” Ramos said.

Finding Answers With AI, ML

Sinclair was early in archiving some of its content in the public cloud, and last year struck a deal with producer Anthony Zuiker to mine its news archives to create original content that can be licensed to third parties. The group has around 23 million assets that were “born digital,” Palmer said, which means they been archived from a newsroom computer system with a script attached to it. Those assets have accurate metadata, allowing one to search that content across the entire enterprise and access it. Sinclair also has another roughly 10 million assets sitting on shelves on varied physical media.

“The question at this point is what do we want to invest in to bring this back?” Palmer said. “We look at news content, and it’s a fact that most news content has no value in the archive. It is the rare jewel that justifies the expense of all the rest of the work that you put into that. So, we’re focused right now in trying to determine, to the best of our knowledge, which portions of the archive have the highest probability for containing those jewels, and then go mining in that direction. And we may not — I say may, because there are no hard decisions at this point — but we may not want to go back to those 10 million assets and actually digitize them all. It depends on what we find.”

Sinclair has worked with archiving vendor Memnon to digitize cutsheets and tape labels on stored media at a few stations. It plans to use AI tools like optical character recognition (OCR) to analyze them and hopefully generate good descriptions that it can then use to determine what is worth digitizing.

Fox Sports has spent several years on its own complex archive project with Google to create a system that allows producers to quickly call up old footage, such as to enhance a halftime package. Ramos said he has been given access to it and “playing with it for about six months.” The system uses two kinds of metadata: metadata created by human loggers, as well as metadata created by the same ML algorithms that form the basis of YouTube search. A user has a choice of searching by either type.

“It’s definitely working,” Ramos said. “It’s a massive, massive archive, it’s huge. They’ve got a lot of content in there, so it would be really hard to search otherwise.”

Ramos’ own budget for AI/ML tools is more modest, so his team has focused on the least expensive AI tools, speech-to-text and OCR, and runs content through the AI tools themselves.

“Usually when there’s an anchor or a reporter talking about something, it relates to the video that’s covering that,” Ramos said. “So that’s been a really good way for us to inexpensively find most of what we need. But it’s not 100% of the way there.”

Finding Affordability

French company Newsbridge wants to make indexing archive content and searching through it more affordable. The company has developed a cloud-based AI engine called MXT-1 that can quickly sift through archive video and generate human-like descriptions, and do it more affordably than conventional AI systems, said Newsbridge CEO Phillippe Petitpont. Its indexing technology can also be applied to ingesting live content.

“With 1,000 hours of archive, there might be three hours that are hidden gems that have a lot of value,” Petitpont said. “So, you need to analyze 1,000 hours but there are maybe only three or four that are relevant. The problem is that current AI, monomodal indexing technology is very expensive. You don’t want to spend $10 million to index something that might be valuable for just two or three hours. So, we took this problem and have been working on it for a few years. We need AI with video understanding that is able to be very efficient, so that it can meet business realities in terms of pricing.”

Petitpont said a key differentiator for Newsbridge’s AI that it is multimodal, which means that it doesn’t just analyze speech or recognize text but considers multiple types of data within video as a human would. And instead of analyzing each individual frame of video, MXT-1 employs “smart subsampling” and only looks at a few key relevant frames. This cuts down on the use of expensive graphics processing units (GPUs) on public cloud compute and avoids wasting money by “overindexing” content.

“We only process a frame that will really best illustrate the content,” Petitpont said. “So then we’ve reduced by an order of magnitude a lot of traditional sampling.”

Sinclair is not currently a customer of Newsbridge, but Palmer said when he spoke with them he was impressed by their smart subsampling approach. The company obviously had arrived earlier at the same conclusion that his team at Sinclair had reached.

“That was, that you don’t need to look at every frame of video,” Palmer said. “You don’t need to do some of these massive tagging things for every frame of video. Some of these AI models will create pages and pages of metadata for each frame of video, and that is not appropriate for news. Less in some cases, and probably this case, is better.”

Read more coverage of NewsTECHForum 2023 here. Watch this session and all the NewsTECHForum 2023 videos here.

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“My job is to be the champion of our news directors, our news leaders across the country, and the stress that they are under is different than I’ve ever seen before,” said Ellen Crooke, Tegna’s SVP of news. “So many of the day-to-day conversations that I have with news leaders are about dealing with the stress of the journalists due to the type of stories they face.”

Frequent mass shootings and other dangers have forced TV-station newsrooms to carefully consider every decision to send a news team out to cover an event and even to reduce exposure by choosing not to report from the field when it’s not deemed necessary.

“That’s one of the things I think that’s changed the most,” Crooke said. “When I started, news leaders were in charge of safety and security. It’s too much now.”

Newsrooms today are employing security consultants and teams and holding careful conversations to determine the best course of action before sending teams out in a knee-jerk reaction to breaking news.

“Good leaders will evaluate every story, every assignment, every situation to ensure that when we need more than what we have, we’re providing that,” said Barb Maushard, SVP of news, Hearst Television.

And those conversations aren’t only around news teams, but around all teams going out to cover any event, including the weather.

“A few years ago, we hired a head of security, but we also mandate that security teams go with every single crew that’s out in the field,” said Nora Zimmett, president, news and original series, Allen Media’s The Weather Group.

Weather is another area that’s changed dramatically in recent years, as reporters and producers increasingly face dramatic weather situations.

“I was raised in the business when it was like ‘suck it up,’ but we don’t do that anymore,” Zimmett said. “There is no mandate to go out and cover anything. We have people who are like ‘OK, I’ll do snow and hurricanes, but I no longer do tornadoes,’ or ‘I’ll do tornadoes and snow. I don’t do hurricanes,’ and that’s OK. Because there is nothing worth that level of stress, that level of PTSD.

“It was a shift for myself, my direct reports and our executive leadership team that just because we were taught that you just deal with it, that doesn’t mean it’s right,” she added. “And that also certainly doesn’t mean you’re going to get the best out of your employees. If you have a reputation in your shop for throwing caution to the wind, you’re not going to retain the best talent. That is not a way to lead your team. I think the news industry has to evolve out of this sort of militaristic attitude of ‘it’s our way or the highway.’”

Newsroom leaders also have had to take steps to support employees’ mental health, which can become fragile while performing difficult jobs in stressful situations.

“Back in the day, it was ‘go do this and write this and send it in,’” said Sam Singal, group VP, Charter Communications’ Spectrum News. “Now I find that we spend a lot of time walking through the newsrooms, pulling up a chair and talking to people and understanding what they’re going through.”

Companies also have made mental health services available to employees.

“We’ve made sure that our employees have places to go to seek support for those who want to stay in and want to be able to manage the challenges of the job,” Maushard said.

Of course, part and parcel of these conversations is the issue of pay — journalism has always been a notably low-paying field except for perhaps the biggest names. But companies have recently been forced to increase salaries as it’s become harder to retain employees.

“We are actively and constantly looking at equity and analyzing what are our competitors paying what our colleagues paying just to make sure that we’re up to par with everybody else,” Singal said.

“We have to pay the right amount of money for the jobs, whatever that amount is supposed to be,” Maushard said. “But I think it’s more than that. It’s about the benefits. It’s about the environments we create. It’s about the purpose. It’s about people wanting to do this and then us having to make these into the kind of environments where they’re going to want to be because our communities depend on it. Democracy depends on it.”

Adding to the stress is the cadence of the 24-hour news cycle — including at TV stations where streaming apps and FAST channels have increased the content burden — as well as the pressure to stay connected with audiences through social media. Technology that automates some of those tasks can help, said Joe DiGiovanni, head of North American sales at The Weather Company.

For example, if a station group like Tegna, which owns 64 stations in 51 markets, is covering one weather crisis in one market and a completely different one in another, technology can help stations communicate with and assist one other.

“There may be somebody out West who is an expert in wildfires, while there may be somebody down South who’s an expert in hurricanes. That’s still a news story in other markets, but they may not have that content. So, through our cloud technologies, they can grab that content from those markets and use it in other places,” DiGiovanni said.

In addition, storing content on the cloud in searchable databases means it’s easy to find in crisis situations.

The Weather Company also provides weather forecasting technology that helps meteorologists tell weather stories to viewers in a way that’s comprehensive but also easy to understand. That type of technology has become increasingly essential as climate change has become a central focus of newsrooms’ ongoing coverage.

“Our job at the Weather Channel is to predict the future, and this uncertain future is scary,” Zimmett said. “We view our job now as not just to predict what’s going to happen in terms of extreme weather, but what’s going to happen to your mortgage, what’s going to happen to your insurance? That is something that is now a fabric of our coverage.”

“It’s not about climate change from where we sit. It’s about climate and weather impact,” Maushard said.

When covering anything from climate change to financial markets, political campaigns or even local traffic, technology remains both a useful tool and a potential threat, especially as newsrooms experiment more and more with artificial intelligence (AI).

“We look at AI in three different ways,” Crooke said. “The first is ethics: How will we as journalists use AI appropriately and transparently? Second: how can we innovate using AI? And third, which is what worries me most: How will we be duped by AI, especially in the 2024 presidential election?”

To avoid the third scenario, Tegna is training all of its journalists in the first quarter of 2024 on how to detect and deflect disinformation propagated with the use of AI.

Because journalism is more stressful and challenging than ever, it’s even more driven by the passion and purpose of those who pursue it, panelists said. That’s the secret sauce that keeps people in the business.

“News really is a calling. You have to have a passion and want to do it because you’re gonna make sacrifices,” Maushard said.

“One of the things that makes people stay in their jobs is feeling that they are part of a purpose, that they are doing work that matters,” Crooke said. “I think we’ve seen so much loss in journalism because there’s not always strong work happening that’s making a difference in our communities. The more we focus on purpose, the better our retention will be.”

Read more coverage of NewsTECHForum 2023 here.

Watch this session and all the NewsTECHForum 2023 videos here.

The post News Leaders Focus On Journalist Protection, Stress In Fraught ’24 appeared first on TV News Check.

Speakers are Devon Armijo, director of digital news integration, Hearst Television; Mike Palmer, AVP advanced technology/media management, Sinclair; Philippe Petitpont, CEO, Newsbridge; Ben Ramos, VP, Fox archive, field and emerging tech, Fox News. TVNewsCheck Contributing Editor Glen Dickson will moderate the discussion.

“AI has fundamentally changed the process of metatagging archives and making them more thoroughly searchable, which in turn has offered pathways to new content creation and licensing opportunities drawing from those archives,” said Michael Depp, chief content officer, NewsCheckMedia and editor, TVNewsCheck. “This session will look closely at how a well-organized, easy-to-retrieve-from archive can have numerous benefits for newsrooms under pressure.

“The panel will also look at the emerging challenge of how media companies can authenticate their deep trove of archival content and determine rights ownership,” he added.

NewsTECHForum, now in its 10^th year, is co-located with the Sports Video Group Summit. The conference’s theme for 2023 is Adapting to a Culture of Continuous Crisis.

Featured sessions are:

• Keynote: Democracy, Technology, TV Journalism and the 2024 Election
• Reassessing the Streaming News Content Strategy
• Chasing AI: Threatening or Enhancing the News?
• Adapting to a Culture of Continuous Crisis
• Agility in News Production
• Building the Architecture of More Collaborative Content Creation

Register here.

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Local broadcasters are transitioning to IP but doing it slowly, faced with the cost and complexity of new technology such as IP routing systems based on the SMPTE 2110 standard. Beyond the upfront capital investment and integration costs, they often have to retrain existing staff, or hire new ones, to manage software-based systems that are very different from traditional hardware. But an eventual move to an IP infrastructure is inevitable, said top engineers and technology vendors who gathered last week for the TVNewsCheck webinar The IP Transition and Local TV, moderated by this reporter.

So far, Fox Television Stations has only transitioned one station to IP, building a brand-new plant for WTTG Washington with a 2110 routing infrastructure. Across the rest of the group, the big technology priority has been moving away from “traditional bare-metal servers” to a virtual hosted infrastructure, running VMware software on on-premise computers, said Paul Capizzi, Fox Corp. chief information officer and SVP enterprise technology. That standardization effort has significantly collapsed the hardware footprint at the stations, improved backup capabilities and set the group up for a scaled rollout to 2110 and video over IP transport at other stations in the future.

“Currently there is no demand for 4K at the local stations,” Capizzi said. “But with that said, we need to start thinking, how do we futureproof our design? What does an SDI gateway look like that we could start deploying and have a scalable approach as all the other technologies are refreshed, plug it in so we can support both SDI and 4K?

“We’re making a ton of progress there,” he said. “We’re also focusing on the infrastructure, so our connectivity coming into the space as well as the network laid out across the environment.”

Sony is seeing the biggest usage for 2110 at the network level, particularly in mobile production trucks used for high-end sports production, said Deon LeCointe, Sony Electronics director of networked solutions, imaging products and solutions – Americas. Most new trucks being deployed are all 2110, as are many newer stadiums and arenas as well as studio facilities for regional sports networks. But the picture is different at the local station level.

“At the call-letter stations we’re seeing more of a cautious approach,” LeCointe said. “I know of a handful of stations that are trying to move toward IP, but what we’re seeing is a lot more of our customers are buying IP-ready gear.”

While IP contribution, such as bonded cellular systems, is widely used across TV stations, most on-premise infrastructure remains HD-SDI. LeCointe noted that compared to previous technology transitions, such as the analog-to-digital conversion or the move from standard-definition to HDTV, there isn’t any “trigger point,” such as a government regulation or industry-driven mandate, to make the shift to 2110. That, combined with the cost premium to SDI that 2110 technology represents, explains why most stations are waiting on the sidelines.

“IP doesn’t represent such a mandate,” LeCointe said. “So, for a local station that is able to deliver the news with their existing SDI infrastructure, there’s no real push for them to go in that direction.”

In the playout and automation market, today 2110 is a “small part of the conversation,” said Shawn Maynard, Florical Systems SVP-general manager. He said that his customers are looking more into virtualization and hosting playout applications in the cloud than investing in 2110 infrastructure today. “We’re definitely seeing more cloud conversations.”

Maynard noted that beyond cost, finding personnel with the expertise to manage IT infrastructures remains a stumbling block for local stations. That is despite the fact that they have been steadily hiring more staff with a deep IT background since broadcasters began shifting to software-based tools some 20 years ago.

“At this level, we still have a big gap in knowledge base for on-site personnel,” Maynard said. “There are great video engineers, but not great IT technicians who can figure it out and map it. So, there are serious challenges on personnel.”

For its part, Hearst Television is systematically working to gain IP experience among its corporate and station staff before it makes any big investment in 2110 hardware, said Stefan Hadl, Hearst Television SVP, broadcast engineering and technology. The group has already done small proofs-of-concept of 2110 routing at two of its stations (WLWT Cincinnati and WESH Orlando), which were designed to build the group’s knowledge base as it looks to gradually refresh equipment across its stations and then efficiently maintain it over time.

The POCs were “a great learning experience,” Hadl said, as Hearst engineers learned how to build a red/blue network and got familiar with the complexities of Precision Time Protocol (PTP).

“This isn’t a software, or a one piece of equipment replacement, that you’ve got to learn and understand,” Hadl said. “This is an infrastructure — this is a station infrastructure that you’re changing from what we have now in an SDI plant. It’s a major lift.”

The POCs involved creating a monitoring wall that ran on 2110 while leaving the stations’ core HD-SDI operations untouched, which represented a low-risk way to experiment with IP.

“We built a monitoring wall because that was the low-hanging fruit,” Hadl said. “If you lose the monitoring wall it’s not going to take you off-air.”

Hadl is excited by the possibilities of 2110 but noted that HD-SDI still works very well today. Looking into the future, however, IP is likely where Hearst is heading.

“When you do a major technology change or you have to do a technology refresh, you have to be thinking about IP,” he said. “I don’t know if we will be doing that immediately. But we are going to be making technology changes in some of our markets that are going to be at that point of, it should all be done, and it should all be done in a 2110 environment. If I had a greenfield opportunity, it probably would be a 2110 environment.”

The CBC had just such an opportunity with its network center in Montreal, where the Canadian public broadcaster was relocating to a new space that was less than half the size of its previous home. The CBC set out to create an all 2110-facility mainly for the scale to tackle a variety of multiplatform production, including its radio broadcasts. But in doing so it was also able to take advantage of the smaller physical footprint of IP gear, as well as the ability to repurpose virtualized computer resources for different applications throughout the day. That is a major difference from the dedicated hardware of the past, said Francois Legrand, CBC senior director, capital roject management, governance and engineering, core systems.

The data center in the CBC’s new plant is one-third the size of the data center in its old HD-SDI plant, which had some 500 racks of equipment. And only one-third of the new IP-based space is actually being used today, with the remaining two-thirds ready for expansion.

“So, we have way more density with IP equipment and software-based equipment than we ever had before,” Legrand said.

The CBC had early interoperability problems at the transport level, particularly exchanging signals between a “software sender and a hardware receiver,” Legrand said. He considered those to be “growing pains” that have mostly been resolved. In addition to uncompressed 2110, the CBC has also been experimenting with compressed formats such as NDI for certain workflows, which can represent significant cost savings.

Legrand is now tackling a project to convert the CBC’s English-language network center in Toronto from its existing HD-SDI infrastructure to IP.

“It’s a bigger facility than Montreal, and we’re not going into a new facility,” he said. “So, we have to build while maintaining the current operation on air and rebuild everything in IP.”

While the CBC has learned a great deal about managing a 2110 plant, Legrand said the technology is still far from “plug-and-play.” For example, he explained how a small PTP problem during a recent network update in Montreal interrupted the CBC’s radio broadcasts for several minutes, despite the facility’s completely redundant red/blue architecture.

But the biggest difficulty to 2110, Legrand said, remains finding technical staff who truly understand how IP works.

“We have lot of engineers within our station who are good support people and have a pretty good idea of the end-to-end SDI workflow,” he said. “Nobody truly understands end-to-end 2110 workflows. There are so many components that need to go well so that the system goes well. This is a true challenge. Although we have a lot of experts, we never have enough of them.”

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A journalist for more than 25 years, his career included original reporting across the U.S. and around the world. He has reported for the CBS Evening News, CBS Sunday Morning, CBS Saturday and on CBS News Radio, when he was a freelance correspondent at the network for three years. He also launched a news startup and led it as editor-in-chief and has taught journalism students at Northwestern University and journalists in Pakistan and Vietnam.

His boss, David Hurlburt, Hearst director, special projects and group initiatives, said: “As chief national investigative correspondent, Mark led the charge of developing the startup unit and crafting its unique approach to uncovering local angles inside bigger, national stories. Mark exemplifies quality journalism, with a dogged commitment to accuracy and transparency, ‘Get the Facts’ reporting, and owning exclusive stories and angles. When the data and breadth of information needed for projects was not available or easily attainable, Mark charged the NIU with building databases on their own, identifying untold stories about school security, hate in the homeland, local weather impact, and more. And somehow, he found a new headline to spotlight in each installment of the NIU’s five-year investigation of election security, recently delivering part 24 of the series!

“Mark and the NIU have received several honors. Among them: the Al Neuharth Award for Innovation in Investigative Journalism for the series ‘Sucked In: America’s Vaping Epidemic,’ a Telly Award for the group program ‘Hate in the Homeland,’ another Telly for the in-depth ‘Forecasting Our Future’ series, and two national Excellence in Financial Journalism awards.”

Albert said he has no immediate plans. “It’s an exciting time in journalism, with lots of innovation, and I want to be a part of it. I’m going to take a little break and then see what opportunities are out there.”

In a farewell note to his Hearst colleagues, Albert said: “Most of all, thank you for your trust. What we do is so vitally important to our democracy. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1799 (a quote I’ve kept on my desk for years): ‘Our citizens may be deceived for a while, and have been deceived; but as long as the presses can be protected, we may trust to them for light.’ Please continue to be that beacon of truth. Our audience is counting on it.”

The post Hearst Investigative Leader Mark Albert Leaves appeared first on TV News Check.

“Hearst has been an important partner for The CW throughout the years and we are extremely pleased to be launching a new CW affiliate in Sacramento,” said Dennis Miller, president of The CW Network. “KQCA-TV is already home to LIV Golf in Sacramento, and this agreement will ensure that viewers there won’t miss a moment of our other highly-rated sports and entertainment programming, including ACC college football and basketball, and Inside the NFL, both of which premiere this fall.”

In addition to the launch of The CW on KQCA, the new agreement covers WKCF Orlando, Fla.; KCWE Kansas City, Mo.; WPXT Portland, Maine; WCWG Greensboro, N.C.; WNNE Burlington, Vt.; and KHOG-KHBS Ft. Smith, Ark.

Michael J. Hayes, president of Hearst Television, said: “The evolution of The CW with the infusion of live sports like NASCAR Xfinity Series racing and ACC football and basketball, along with new entertainment programming, brings excitement and momentum to our group. We look forward to working with Dennis and his team in this expanded partnership, continuing our relationship with the network.”

The post CW And Hearst Expand, Extend Affiliation Partnership appeared first on TV News Check.

Kenneth Murphy

Kenneth Murphy, a Hearst technology executive for more than two decades who most recently has served as Hearst’s executive director, network architecture and engineering, has been named vice president of information technology for Hearst Television.

The promotion, effective July 31, was announced today by Michael J. Hayes, president of Hearst Television, and Stefan Hadl, Hearst Television’s SVP, broadcast engineering and technology.

“Ken has a history of Hearst success and will bring that knowledge with him in this move to Hearst Television,” Hayes said. “His experience in security, systems and integration is additive to our technology strategy today and fortifies it for the future.”

“Ken will be responsible for helping lead all of Hearst Television’s technological initiatives,” Hadl said. “A primary focus is on IT security; he will also lead the planning, design and implementation of our next-generation IT networking infrastructure to support all operations relative to connectivity, storage, data, and video transport and distribution. And he will help lead our strategic planning and deployment of cloud resources and technology with the objective of making our operations more efficient and nimble.”

Murphy has risen rapidly through the ranks in Hearst’s technology operations, moving from network engineer in 2005 to manager, network engineering; associate director, network engineering and director, networking before assuming his most recent role.

Among many other accomplishments, as executive director, network architecture and engineering,  he has led an initiative to standardize Hearst’s network security, achieving a first-ever companywide unification of network security platforms; directed the research, development, and implementation of a modern SD-WAN platform, transforming Hearst’s network data capabilities while helping enable new business connectivity opportunities; led an initiative to identify and isolate business critical at-risk networks to better prepare for attacks and threats; and developed and managed a team of network engineers responsible for implementing enterprise-wide IT infrastructure.

Murphy holds a Bachelor of Science degree, summa cum laude, in information systems, with concentration in internetworking technologies, from Strayer University in Charlotte, N.C., and has participated in a Hearst Technical Leadership Program administered by Cornell University as well as a Hearst Leadership Development Program administered by Harvard Business Publishing.

Among numerous honors, he was an inaugural recipient of Hearst’s Neil McManus Award in recognition of customer service, dedication, professional excellence and team leadership, as well as United States Air Force medals for good conduct, outstanding service and meritorious service.

The post Hearst Television Ups Kenneth Murphy To VP, Information Technology appeared first on TV News Check.

The promotion, effective immediately, was announced today by Michael J. Hayes, president of Hearst Television, and Andrew Fitzgerald, Hearst Television’s senior vice president, streaming video services.

“Michael combines the special ability to lead and identify exceptional producers while maintaining his innate sense of creativity and collaboration,” Hayes said.  “He brings the eye of an artist and the mind of an executive which we are blessed to have in our group.”

Fitzgerald said: “My partnership with Michael Callahan has truly been one of the highlights of my time at Hearst Television. His creativity and leadership have driven our video innovation time and again across numerous platforms. Michael is an incredible leader with a sharp creative mind for the development of new shows and concepts, and the team and studio he has built for Very Local is an unparalleled production unit.”

Callahan joined Hearst in 2014 as a development executive in the company’s Entertainment & Syndication Group, where he developed and produced series for such outlets as Eli Roth’s CryptTV, Complex, and Awesomeness TV, working with personalities including Kristin Cavallari and Kelly Osbourne. He moved to Hearst Television in 2016. While leading the Hearst Television Digital Studio, Callahan was responsible for defining new social video formats, developing shows for Facebook and YouTube, and launching a locally focused digital video brand studio. In his most recent role, he has built and led the growing Very Local production studio, where he has co-created, developed, and executive produced more than two dozen original series and more than 200 half-hour unscripted episodes for FAST and AVOD consumption, working closely with Laura Ling, who was recently promoted to vice president, overseeing Very Local programming.

Among these original shows, Blind Kitchen recently earned a long-form Emmy in New England. In addition, Callahan continues to oversee the Very Local Brand Studio, putting high quality native video production in service of local clients.

Prior to Hearst, Callahan was a creator, director and producer developing a variety of content for various television and video companies. He served in multiple roles including writer and showrunner for unscripted programs produced for Artists First (formerly Principato-Young Entertainment), based in Sherman Oaks, Calif., while also serving as producer, writer and host for two daily Yahoo! web series, TV in No Time and Nighttime in No Time.

Before Yahoo! he was an associate producer, writer and voiceover talent for multiple Fox Sports programs. A SAG actor, he also has handled hosting and voiceover duties for numerous programs and ad campaigns on behalf of organizations including MTV, Dr. Pepper, Virgin Mobile and Nintendo, among others.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from California State University at Northridge.

The post Hearst Television Ups Michael Callahan To VP Production At Very Local appeared first on TV News Check.

What would you do if someone were to invite you along for adventures like these … for the first time?

Outdoor enthusiasts and others will be able to find out beginning August 1 when Season Three of Finding Adventure launches on the Very Local app, available to stream for free on all mobile, tablet and connected TV devices.

Host Kinga Philipps, ocean conservationist, thrill seeker and the first female host of Shark Week, travels to locations across the country, taking local residents along with her for “the coolest, most breathtaking and heart-pounding experiences.” Philipps serves as expert and mentor taking participants and viewers “out of their comfort zones” to experience incredible outdoor adventures right in their own backyards. Along the way, she challenges each guest to learn how stepping outside of the norm can be scary, but ultimately amazing and transformative.

“I am so thrilled to be back for Season 3; we are meeting new people, traveling to new destinations and providing transformative experiences that ignite a sense of curiosity, connection and personal growth,” Philipps said. “Each individual’s journey looks a bit different, and the destination is never the same — but that is what makes this show so special.”

Seasons 1 and 2 of the 30-minute show took viewers to Sacramento, Calif.; Portland, Maine; Kansas City, Mo.; New Orleans; Orlando, Fla.; Pittsburgh; Louisville, Ky.; Greenville, S.C.; Milwaukee; Manchester, N.H.; and Albuquerque, N.M.

For Season 3, Philipps brings the show for the first time to Cincinnati and Savannah, Ga., with return visits to Albuquerque and Manchester.

Hearst Television launched Very Local in 2021 to provide original non-scripted programming across genres with a focus on production in Hearst Television’s more than two dozen local media markets. The Very Local team produces more than 100 hours of content a year, including more than a dozen titles and hundreds of interstitial programs, and manages the schedules of more than two dozen FAST channels.

The post Hearst Television To Launch Season 3 Of ‘Finding Adventure’ Streaming Exclusively On The Very Local App appeared first on TV News Check.

In the newly created position, Grimes will continue to oversee WCVB and will add corporate oversight of WMTW and WPXT, the ABC and CW affiliates serving Portland-Auburn, Maine; WMUR, the ABC affiliate in Manchester, N.H.; and WPTZ and WNNE, the NBC and CW affiliates serving the Plattsburgh, N.Y.-Burlington, Vt., television market, where Grimes served as president and general manager earlier in his career. The presidents & general managers of these stations will report to him.

The promotion, effective immediately, was announced today by Michael J. Hayes, Hearst Television’s president, to whom Grimes will continue to report.

“We are fortunate to have strong operators at our television stations and Kyle has consistently demonstrated outstanding leadership in every assignment,” Hayes said. “With intimate knowledge of the region as a general manager in two of the properties, this additional responsibility is a natural transition for him and for Hearst Television. The alignment enables us to continue capitalizing on our regional strength, thereby maximizing our opportunity and presence in New England.”

Led by WCVB, the stations in New England collaborated cohesively on coverage of the 2023 Boston Marathon. For the first time in 17 years, WCVB became the home of the Marathon; the rights included carriage for Hearst’s other New England stations and WCVB’s coverage was carried nationally on ESPN.

Under Grimes’s leadership, WCVB continued to lead Boston’s television market in news ratings and journalism awards. In 2023 the station earned regional Emmy Awards in 10 categories, including Best Evening Newscast and Breaking News, as well as regional Edward R. Murrow Awards for Overall Excellence, Best Newscast and Breaking News, and a National Headliner Award for Severe Weather Coverage.

Prior to moving to WCVB in 2020, Grimes was president-GM of WGAL, Hearst’s NBC affiliate in the Harrisburg-Lancaster, Pa., market During his tenure, the station added more than seven hours of local news per week as well as a weekly local public affairs show. The station earned regional Emmy Awards in 2016 and 2019 for Best Newscast as well as regional Associated Press honors, including Outstanding News Operation and Best Newscast, in 2017, 2018 and 2019. Through telethons and other efforts, WGAL raised millions of dollars for various organizations including the Red Cross, the Children’s Miracle Network; and for the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank.

In his previous assignment as president-GM of WPTZ-WNNE, the stations received a national Edward R. Murrow Award for their investigative journalism, and two regional Murrow Awards for nationally prominent reporting on the prison escape of convicted murderers.

Earlier in his career, Grimes also was the duopoly’s news director from 2005 to 2008. In between his two positions at WPTZ-WNNE, he was news director at Hearst ABC affiliate WPBF West Palm Beach, Fla.

Grimes began his career at Hearst’s California television properties, first at KSBW Monterey-Salinas, later at KCRA-KQCA Sacramento, where he was a newscast producer.

Among other industry associations, Grimes serves as board chair for the Massachusetts Broadcasters Association, and previously served on the state broadcaster association boards in Pennsylvania and Vermont.

Grimes holds a bachelor’s degree in broadcast journalism from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University.

The post Hearst Promotes Kyle I. Grimes To New England VP appeared first on TV News Check.

Cox Reps, Graham Media, Gray Television and Hearst Television have joined together to work with Matrix on its Admiral Media Sales Gateway. Sinclair is working closely with Operative on its Advanced Operating System (AOS). And WideOrbit is rolling out its Fusion system. All three are major first steps to getting the entire local TV ad space more automated and less complicated.

The keys to moving station groups off their legacy systems and methodologies are multi-fold. First, leadership and personnel have to be willing to make changes, and that’s hard to implement across large organizations.

Rob Weisbord

“The holdup is more of a legacy mentality,” says Rob Weisbord, president and chief operating officer, Sinclair Broadcast Group. “Using legacy systems is easy, they’re what people know. But the flavor of the day is future forward – not where we need to be today but where we need to be three-to-five years from now. Future forward is cross-platform sales and distribution of content.”

Second, entire systemic changes can’t be made all once but need to be done piecemeal, upgrading one segment at a time. To do that, interoperability and flexibility are essential. Once these “pitch-to-play” platforms are in place, however, it should be easier to move connecting systems in and out without creating downtime.

Ted Kramer

“The trick to improving local broadcast automation right now is to find intelligent automation that can be utilized from day one without a major shift in workflow,” says Ted Kramer, SVP, sales and marketing, ProVantageX, which helps broadcasters maximize sell-side projections through revenue optimization tools.

And third, once these systems are in place, they need to be able to talk to each other both inside and outside of organizations and on both the buy and sell sides to simplify and streamline the entire process.

Ben Tatta

“TV delivers better than any other platform,” says Ben Tatta, chief commercial officer, Operative. “Anyone that’s run attribution knows there’s nothing close to it. Local merchants know that when they aren’t running on air, their phone isn’t ringing, people aren’t coming into the store. That being said, just because it’s so easy to buy Google, local search and YouTube, a lot of local advertisers have put money there because it’s easier to buy. To continue to grow the local ad business, buyers need a simple way to buy.”

All three of the above major systems will serve as “pitch-to-play” platforms, but they will not, in and of themselves, handle all of the functions required to fully automate linear and digital advertising sales. Instead, they will rely on bespoke APIs to connect disparate programs and then create one dashboard on which sellers can track inventory, revenue, campaign performance, analytics and more. They will all operate in the cloud as software as a service (SaaS) systems, allowing sales teams to access information any place, any time on almost any device while not requiring wholesale technology upgrades across organizations.

“The AOS platform functions like an operating system,” Tatta says. “It’s literally like a fine-mesh fabric that you drape over all of your systems and then you are able to move all of your data from those systems to the cloud and manage them as one unified workflow.”

Sinclair opted to work with Operative after consulting with Deloitte to vet various vendors, Weisbord says.

“From a local broadcast side, we’ll be the proof of concept,” he says. “It’s good for the whole industry to have consistency. Our competition isn’t other broadcasters; it’s the digital companies — the FAANGs of the world. We need to make the sales process as easy as possible.”

Sinclair is taking Operative AOS live in three markets — Boise, Idaho; Charleston, W.Va.; and Minneapolis — on April 2.

A larger industry consortium is partnering with Matrix on its Admiral Media Sales Gateway, which is due to start rolling out early next year. Some 85% of U.S. broadcasters, including Nexstar, Scripps and Univision, use Matrix’s revenue management system.

Mark Gorman

“We’re a software company looking to grow,” says Mark Gorman, CEO of Matrix. “For this industry, this is absolutely needed in order to change.

“In 2022, global ad revenue was just under $800 billion and U.S. television represented $66 billion of that,” he says. “My whole push is how we can make traditional media easy to understand, buy and measure. Instead of fighting over our little piece of the pie, we can go and reclaim more of this revenue.”

“There’s a dramatic need for Matrix and others and that’s emanating from the fundamental change in our business,” says Al Lustgarten, SVP of technology and information services, Hearst Television. “We’re focusing a lot on the extension of our products into the digital realm, so we’re seeing more need for converged transactions between our digital and our broadcast businesses.

Al Lustgarten

“Hearst Television has come out as a supporter of impressions as currency,” he says. “There’s a broader need for tools to help us transact on these platforms. All of these things will be bundled into a new sales front end.”

Finally, WideOrbit, which provides TV stations’ traffic systems among other services, plans to introduce WideOrbit Fusion Local at the NAB Show in Las Vegas in April. It then expects to start testing and rolling out functionality over the next six to eight quarters, with the aim of having that solution in market by the end of 2024.

Devlin Jefferson

“I don’t see a lot of local media operations swapping out systems in 2024, which is a presidential election year and you can’t touch that,” says Devlin Jefferson, SVP and GM, sales systems, WideOrbit. “So, let’s get a good testing base in place and then by 2024, we’ll have our feedback in and we’ll see upgrades in 2025.”

Separately, Atlanta-based Revenue Analytics has RateOptics, a dynamic inventory management system that allows broadcasters to optimize ad placement on the fly using predictive analytics. RateOptics launched in 2019 and is currently used by four of the top-10 local broadcast groups, including Sinclair, Hearst and Gray, as well as top radio companies.

Steph Garferick

“We are the pricing analytics behind [all three of] those [end-to-end workflow] platforms,” says Steph Garferick, SVP, Revenue Analytics. “What we obsess over is that it’s one thing to know where you are right now. But our engines look at where you will end up. If you are selling [inventory] early on at a discount and then you get to that 80%-90% sellout, you can start selling at a higher rate. We want to make pricing move sooner. You would never sell the first Super Bowl ticket for $5 just because it’s the first ticket. You need to bring predictive analytics to this problem.”

Offering dynamic pricing will allow broadcasters to place advertisers in precisely the slots they are seeking, and to do that in real time, avoiding preemptions and make-goods that make broadcast advertising sales inefficient.

“[What Revenue Analytics offers] really has been my pet project for a very long time,” Weisbord says. “Dynamic pricing moves up and down based on demand in the marketplace. In the travel industry, if you book in a five-star hotel and you get a one-star hotel, you are going to write a scathing review. Today with the streamers and so many options to run ads, we can’t afford to not treat schedules with care.”

Although RateOptics has been out for four years, it’s been in a bit of a holding pattern while waiting for the workflow platforms to launch. “Ultimately, we found that we were ahead of what existed in the marketplace, so we’ve been expanding our offering and building out more modules within our application because people were getting really greedy for this data,” Garferick said.

It’s all building toward modernizing the local broadcast advertising platform so that it will be competitive with digital content providers.

“Maximized reach is what it’s all about — capturing audiences that have moved off of linear and on to streaming and digital platforms and re-aggregating those audiences at the local level at scale,” Tatta says. “There aren’t going to be many media entries that can deliver that kind of reach when you put it all together.”

The post Automated Local TV Ad Sales Finally On Near Horizon appeared first on TV News Check.

“Will’s experience and proven leadership will be a strong addition to our newsroom,” said John Humphries WYFF president and general manager. “He has a passion for local news, strong storytelling, and community service — all cornerstones of the legacy of this television station. Will has grown through the ranks of our company, and we’re proud to welcome him to the WYFF News 4 team.”

Dillard went to WJCL as assistant news director in 2015 shortly after the station was acquired by Hearst Television. He has helped lead the growth of the station though expansion of the weekday morning news, and the launch of weekday 7 p.m. and weekend morning newscasts.

Under Dillard’s leadership the station won its first Regional Edward R. Murrow award, as well as best newscast awards from the Associated Press and Georgia Association of Broadcasters (GAB). Most recently WJCL won best team political coverage from the GAB last year.

“I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to lead this outstanding news team,” said Dillard. “WYFF 4 has an unparalleled history of leadership and telling the stories that matter to the community. I’m grateful to have the opportunity to continue that commitment to excellence.”

Dillard began his career with Hearst Television in 2008, joining WPBF West Palm Beach, Fla., where he held various roles including producer and assignment manager.

The post Will Dillard Named WYFF Greenville News Director appeared first on TV News Check.

Outdoor enthusiasts and neophytes alike will be able to find out beginning March 7 when Season 2 of Finding Adventure launches on the Very Local app, available to stream for free on all mobile, tablet and connected TV devices.

Host Kinga Philipps, ocean conservationist, thrill seeker and first female host of Shark Week travels to locations around the country, taking local residents along with her for “the coolest, most breathtaking and heart-pounding experiences.” Philipps serves as expert and mentor taking participants and viewers alike “out of their comfort zones” to experience incredible outdoor adventures right in their own backyards.

Michael Callahan, Very Local senior director, digital studios, said: “Watching the personal transformations of the inspiring locals we’ve invited on the show is one of the most rewarding experiences we’ve had as creators. Kinga Philipps couldn’t be more compassionate and captivating as their mentor, and our tenacious producing team did a wonderful job capturing more heartwarming and heart-pounding stories in Season Two of Finding Adventure.”

Over the course of 12 episodes, Season 1 of the 30-minute show took viewers to Sacramento, Calif.; Portland, Maine; Kansas City, Mo.; New Orleans; Orlando, Fla.; and Pittsburgh.

In this brand-new season, Philipps will take viewers along on adventures in Louisville, Ky; Greenville, S.C.; Milwaukee; Manchester, N.H.; and Albuquerque, N.M., with new episodes rolling out every Tuesday through April 25 for a total of eight new installments.

Hearst Television launched Very Local in 2021 to provide original non-scripted programming across genres with a focus on production in Hearst Television’s more than two dozen local media markets. The Very Local team produces more than 100 hours of content a year, including more than a dozen titles and hundreds of interstitial programs, and manages the schedules of more than two dozen FAST channels.

The post Hearst Television Launches Season 2 Of ‘Finding Adventure’ Series Streaming Exclusively On The Very Local App appeared first on TV News Check.

Panelists include Erin Johnson, executive producer, Entertainment Tonight; Stephen Brown, EVP of programming and development, Fox First Run and Fox Television Stations; Meredith McGinn, EVP of diginets & original production, NBCUniversal Local; Andrew Fitzgerald, SVP, streaming video services, Hearst Television; and Michaela Pereira, host, Michaela. Michael Depp, chief content officer, NewsCheckMedia LLC and editor, TVNewsCheck, will moderate the 2 p.m. PT discussion.

“Programming genres like talk, game shows and travel/lifestyle endure for good reasons, but even the most popular among them can’t afford complacency, especially given the needs of different platforms” Depp said. “Erin, Stephen, Meredith, Andrew and Michaela bring that understanding to their respective projects, and this panel will be a show-and-tell opportunity to share their work and explain their underlying strategies.”

Programming Everywhere, set for April 16 at the Encore in Las Vegas, gathers industry leaders to talk about the evolving business of content creation and distribution, with a focus on new development, reinventing local and national news and extending media brands on streaming.

TV station group senior executives will join programming, news and marketing leaders, syndicated programming executives and streaming media and technology leaders will take on issues such as the changing economics of syndicated programming, the relationship between FAST channels and the evolution of broadcasting, transforming television news and strategies for creating a programming everywhere business.

Participants will also consider their No. 1 challenge: creating more content for a multimedia audience, and how technologies like artificial intelligence, the cloud and IP production platforms can free up creative talent while streamlining costs.

Panels include FAST Channels and the Evolution of Broadcasting; Syndication’s Changing Business Model; Fresh Approaches to the News Franchise; Mining the Archives for New Shows; and Strategies for Building A Content Everywhere Business.

Register here for Programming Everywhere.

The post How Are Programming Leaders Rethinking Genres For A Multiplatform World? appeared first on TV News Check.

When the CDC announced a rise in STD transmission in 2021, a Graham national team produced a story about ways people can help stop the spread. Last year in Austin, Texas, a few weeks after the Uvalde school shooting tragedy, Nexstar-owned KXAN profiled a school training program launched in Colorado to prevent mass shootings. And when the calendar flipped to 2023, Hearst’s Chief National Consumer Correspondent Jeff Rossen explained the “50-30-20” rule for better personal budgeting in the new year.

The through line between these otherwise disparate stories — from local newscasts and national broadcasts of various groups, appearing on their digital and linear platforms and running across topical and tonal spectrums — is that they are part of an emerging TV news trend. In “solutions journalism,” reporters don’t simply deliver the news. They help solve everyday problems their viewers face.

David Lieberman

“It’s the antidote to ‘if it bleeds it leads,’” says David Lieberman, associate professor of professional practice in media management at The New School. When consumers watch solutions journalism, he says, they think to themselves, “This is news I can use,” and it provides them “a sense of empowerment.”

He adds: “It’s relevant, it’s optimistic, it doesn’t leave them feeling down.”

Tough Reporting By Nature

Something solutions journalism is not, according to its champions, is fluff.

“This is not soft reporting,” says James Finch, VP of news services at Gray Television, which has produced a number of solutions journalism stories throughout the group. “As journalists, our primary concern should be the public, people we serve. If we know that the audience does not like persistent problems, then we should be hunting for solutions.”

Lieberman says the best practices of good journalism are also those of good solutions journalism: “Being skeptical, giving conflicting points of view, raising tough questions, showing the relevance.”

Gray recently formed a team to train its reporters in solutions journalism and launched an internal website containing courses on how to produce such stories. Finch says one features an acronym-based teaching tool that communicates Gray’s four pillars of solutions journalism. Always hearkening back to “PEEL,” Gray reporters crafting solutions journalism pieces will remember to present a “problem,” “explain” a solution and provide “evidence” that it may work in a community, while also describing its potential “limitations.”

Among the solutions journalism packages at Gray that Finch is most proud of is Bridging The Great Health Divide, a series of dozens of stories about health disparities in the Delta and Appalachian regions. The pieces, produced with an eye toward enacting change in those communities, were generated in 2022, with contributions from about 30 Gray markets, Finch says.

Solutions Journalism Network

The project was buoyed by the Solutions Journalism Network, which provided the initial training of Gray production teams in solutions journalism. The nonprofit was launched 10 years ago by two New York Times writers, David Bornstein and Tina Rosenberg, who worked on the opinion section’s “Fixes” column, devoted to problem solving. Courtney Martin, an activist and writer who’d frequently contributed to “Fixes,” also helped launch the organization.

Tina Rosenberg (Emmanuel Upegui photo)

Rosenberg says that she and her cofounders wanted “to share the methodology for doing that kind of reporting.” They quickly found that “journalists want to do solutions reporting. They’re tired of reporting the same problem story over and over again,” Rosenberg says, adding that consumers are equally as fatigued by this approach to news delivery.

The Solutions Journalism Network (SJN) now has a staff of around 50, Rosenberg says, and has worked with upward of 700 different news organizations in the U.S. and abroad and at least 25,000 journalists.

A Longer Trajectory

But solutions journalism actually predates the SJN by a couple decades. Bill Dodd, author of Solutions Journalism: News at the Intersection of Hope, Leadership, and Expertise, says much of its DNA is tied to the “public” or “civic” journalism movement of the 1990s. That initiative focused on community issues and aimed to activate citizens, making them more informed and politically energized.

Solutions journalism has since evolved, with print publications initially more apt to adopt it because of the space flexibility their medium allows. Describing a problem, its effects on a community, the ways individual or institutional changes might be enacted on a sustainable level and the possible shortcomings of a presented solution is awfully difficult to do in 90-second TV news blocks.

“It’s very rigorous, investigative and evidence based … even to the extent of being quite critical and antagonistic,” Dodd says of the best solutions journalism.

TV News’ Embrace

TV news groups are buying in.

“The demands of TV news to do something visually interesting can sometimes make it difficult to get out of the rut that a lot of TV news is in,” Rosenberg says. She sees repetition in the photography of TV news: “Stand-ups in front of accident zones and shooting zones.” But, she says, “It seems to me like more and more news organizations are breaking out of that.”

In addition to “Rossen Reports,” Hearst’s national segment behind the “50-30-20 rule” of personal budgeting and other solutions-focused stories, the company also produced “Forecasting Our Future,” a dynamic series of content covering weather and climate change. Hearst’s SVP of News, Barb Maushard, says the initiative “explores problems and solutions,” and that the company’s journalists are committed to helping their audiences “navigate the challenges and changes of their daily life.

Barb Maushard

“We do our job best when we go beyond the surface, explain the ‘why’ of a story, help the audience understand the impact and explore solutions to complex problems,” Maushard says. “Coverage that explores divisions and provides outlets for conversation and education can strengthen communities. It’s not our job to tell viewers what to do, but we serve them well when we showcase successful outcomes to various challenges and provide tools to help viewers address their needs.”

ABC Owned Stations are building solutions journalism stories from data collected from its Neighborhood Safety Tracker, technology that gleans safety-centric public information from city and state agencies. The group’s KTRK Houston has found the tracker particularly helpful in its pursuit of solutions journalism packages. The station recently produced one story about the successful efforts of community members to lower crime in their neighborhood, after the tracker revealed data supporting the drop. In another piece, the tracker identified car-part theft hotspots and the ways automobile owners can more effectively protect their vehicles.

John Kelly

John Kelly, director of data journalism at ABC Owned Television Stations, says these types of stories, leveraged by Neighborhood Safety Tracker data, as opposed to a “run-of-the-mill crime report,” create “better informed residents” who “can make decisions that might reduce” safety risks and “debunk” ideas that a certain neighborhood is “crime-ridden.”

Both observations reflect two key components of solutions journalism’s value proposition to TV news outlets. Author Bill Dodd says “the starting point for solutions journalism” is data journalism, which has become en vogue in its own right because presenting hard data in a news segment inherently displays station transparency, while helping solidify trust in the reporter and, by proxy, their newsgroup’s brand. And, particularly for local stations, solutions journalism provides opportunities to cover marginalized communities that deal with crime, poverty and other challenges in more positive ways.

Graham’s Solutionaries

Catherine Badalamente

Catherine Badalamente, president and CEO of Graham Media Group, says many TV news brands “have a really bad rap just for reporting on all the bad things that happen in certain communities, which is really not fair.” She observes that solutions journalism doesn’t necessarily have to be “good news,” but “news that’s good for you,” the viewer.

“It can be about something that’s really challenging, but also trying to find the people that are trying to fix it [and] improve their communities,” she says.

After learning about solutions journalism three years ago in conversation with people from the Knight Foundation and the Solutions Journalism Network, Badalamente gathered the Graham digital team to devise some solutions-focused programming. The result, initially piloted at WKMG Orlando, Fla., before becoming primarily a national YouTube feature, was Solutionaries, a series that, according to its web description, “highlights creative thinkers and doers in communities focused on making a positive impact.”

Jeremy Allen

“Our intention is to be intentional about providing a positive outlook and not having people come away from our stories thinking that there is no answer and feeling hopeless, instead knowing that there is support, there are people helping and that there are solutions,” says Jeremy Allen, the executive producer of Solutionaries who, like others who work on the show, engaged in SJN training in the run up to its launch. “People are clamoring for this type of material.”

Solutionaries has provided plausible solutions to everything from work burnout to school absenteeism, roadside dangers to hurricane home damage. Badalamente, who says solutions journalism is important to her and something she believes in, has overseen the recent launch of the Solutionaries podcast — an indication of the initiative’s success.

Allen says the audience’s response, based on YouTube comments and other conversations he and his team have had, has been “very positive.

“There’s an appreciation for at least an effort to find something positive to report about or to offer an answer to problems instead of offering more problems to problems,” he says.

But Allen adds that a “major part” of solutions journalism is “poking holes in the solutions we’re offering.” It’s an acknowledgement that there may be imperfections to a given solution that’s been presented, and that it may not solve everyone’s problems, he says. “But it’s a thing that is moving the needle in a positive direction,” he continues. “The more transparent and honest we are about knowing the flaws and limitations there are in our reporting, the more connective tissue that forms between us and our audience.”

CBS And Nexstar Tackle Solutions

Chad Cross

CBS Television Stations is also among the news groups that have recently committed to solutions journalism. Reporters are being trained internally, using the SJN approach, says Chad Cross, VP of content development.

“Our focus is to serve our communities so that we’re not just presenting reports every day about problems happening within them, but exploring how those problems are being addressed,” Cross says. “We’re looking for ways to report on the resiliency of communities as they respond to serious issues.”

Last fall, the CBS Local News Innovation Lab produced Handcuffs in Hallways, an investigative project focused on arrests of elementary-age schoolchildren. Cross told TVNewsCheck in November that an important component of the series was the various solutions to the problem collected from the 14 markets involved in its production. The company also examined possible solutions to school shootings in another series, Kids Saving Kids, and Cross says more solutions journalism content is on the way, including an upcoming group-wide project covering youth mental health programs in various markets.

“When you think about having 14 newsrooms across the country generating a solutions story and then we share that story, you can have an audience in Las Vegas learn about something working in San Francisco,” Cross says. “Maybe that starts a conversation about what’s going on where you live.”

Another group producing more solutions journalism stories is Nexstar with its KXAN Austin, Texas, becoming particularly prolific in the category. Branded as a home for in-depth investigative journalism, KXAN has produced a number of solutions-oriented stories, even devoting an entire landing page on its website to them.

Eric Lassberg

“How many times have you seen an investigation and at the end you’re [thinking], ‘Thank you for telling me this horrible problem, but now what?’” says KXAN GM Eric Lassberg. “We just felt like going toward a solution on some of these big issues and crafting the journalism in that way would be the perfect way to build upon our brand.”

Though it’s difficult to quantify the precise impact KXAN’s devotion to solutions journalism has had, Lassberg says the station has received numerous emails from viewers and heard from people in public indicating that it’s serving them well. He also says the station’s ratings lead in the market continues to expand, while some of its solutions journalism stories have led to policy changes and national and regional Murrow Awards.

To achieve all this, KXAN did not need to break its budget.

“We can’t call corporate and say, ‘We want to add five bodies.’ It just doesn’t work that way anywhere,” Lassberg says. “You’ve got a finite amount of resources and you’re just going to have to allocate more of those towards the investigative brand.”

According to Lassberg, KXAN also applied for an SJN grant that included on-site newsroom training, as well as funding and additional resources for the station’s first solutions journalism project, which became “Save Our Students: Solutions for Wellness & Safety,” a series centered around the mental health of young people in education settings.

Solutions Journalism Abroad

Though its roots may reside stateside, solutions journalism is becoming popular outside the U.S. as well. The BBC has developed a few different solutions journalism programs, including People Fixing the World, primarily a podcast that sometimes features video content, too.

Dougal Shaw, who worked as a producer on People Fixing the World for 18 months, says the stint was “the most rewarding of my career so far, both in terms of creativity and personal satisfaction, because of the audience reaction.”

He cites a couple of stories — about circular runways at airports and a Swedish shopping mall with stores that sell only items made from recycled materials — that he says each earned nearly 50 million views and tens of thousands of likes on social media.

“You are used to negative comments on social, but there was a torrent of positive energy,” Shaw says. “People were curious about the solutions and wanted to applaud and share them. There was clearly an appetite for this type of story.”

Shaw likes working on solutions journalism so much that even after leaving People Fixing the World and working for the BBC’s business news team, he developed a series, CEO Secrets, where business leaders often share problem-solving advice. He also just spun CEO Secrets into a new book of the same name.

Gaining Momentum

Solutions journalism might not become a driving production force behind regular top stories in newscasts, replacing segments about safety and other issues that, while unsettling, are also important to viewers. But sources for this story roundly believe solutions journalism will continue to spread throughout the industry. There’s data to suggest it should.

In 2020, the Solutions Journalism Network commissioned a SmithGeiger study about the impact of solutions journalism on newsrooms. “[T]here was a significant lift in key news consumer responses to the stories that demonstrated core principles of solutions journalism,” said an SJN press release about the study. This translated into deeper audience engagement and interest, particularly among younger viewers, as well as an increased desire on the part of consumers to become more actively involved in local concerns. Solutions journalism, the report said, also strengthens accountability. (The report posed: “If Cleveland finds a solution to a problem, a reporter in Cincinnati can run the story and ask Cincinnati authorities: Why aren’t you trying this?”)

In today’s multichannel ecosystem, TV news groups can also develop strong, multi-faceted solutions journalism stories without worrying about such strict time regulations that come with linear broadcasts. If they want to produce solutions journalism for traditional TV stations, sources suggest publishers consider going the series route, which will allow reporters to unpack all the details required in solutions-oriented stories.

“We’re pretty good at finding problems and presenting them. This is just a different way of working that muscle,” says Gray’s Finch. “Ultimately, the audience is like, ‘I want this to stop. I want to see a brighter day.’ We’re just helping them to get there.”

The post TV Groups Turn To Solutions Journalism, And Viewers Lean In appeared first on TV News Check.

In this new role, Franklin will identify news professionals for positions across the company’s news division. She will also oversee the Fred Young Hearst Television Producing Fellowship program.

Barbara Maushard, Hearst Television senior vice president, news, said: “We’ve always placed a premium on leadership; this new corporate position was designed for someone with an eye for recruiting strong managers for our local, multiplatform news operations. Akili has succeeded quickly in every role she’s undertaken at Hearst Television, and has advanced rapidly in our company. She’s now taking on a very important job: identifying and developing newsroom leaders of the future — leaders who espouse the core values of professional journalism and who can adapt to the rapidly changing media landscape.”

Franklin will work closely with Sinan Sadar, Hearst Television’s director, news talent recruitment, who will continue to focus on hiring for on-air positions.

Among a number of accomplishments during Franklin’s time there, the WYFF newsroom earned a national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2022. Franklin has spent most of her career with Hearst Television; before moving to WYFF in 2020, she served since 2016 as news director at Hearst Television’s WDSU New Orleans. “Under her leadership,” Hearst said, “WDSU News thrived and, by 2017, became the No. 1 local newscast across several dayparts and earned multiple Emmy, AP and Louisiana Association of Broadcasters awards. Her team was also nationally recognized in 2018 with the Edward R. Murrow Award for Breaking News.”

Before WDSU, Franklin was assistant news director at Hearst’s WVTM Birmingham, Ala.  Before that, she served a prior tour at WYFF, as news producer and later executive producer. She previously was a news producer at Hearst’s WPBF West Palm Beach, Fla.

She holds a degree in mass communications from Hampton University.

Franklin is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists. In 2021 she was named a Riley Fellow of South Carolina-based Furman University Riley Institute’s Diversity Leaders Initiative, joining a network of South Carolinians that includes corporate CEOs, legislators, superintendents, religious and nonprofit heads, and business and community leaders. Also that year, she received a Jefferson Award for Public Service in connection with being designated a public-service ChangeMaker by the national nonprofit organization Multiplying Good.

The post Hearst Television Promotes Akili Franklin To Corporate Recruiting Position appeared first on TV News Check.

The promotion, effective immediately, was made today by Jordan Wertlieb, president of Hearst Television, and Andrew Fitzgerald, Hearst Television’s senior vice president, streaming video services.

In this new role, Ling oversees the strategy and team responsible for new, locally focused original programming for Very Local, which Hearst Television launched in 2021 to provide original non-scripted programming across genres with a focus on production in Hearst Television’s more than two dozen local media markets.  The Very Local team produces more than 100 hours of content a year, including more than a dozen titles and hundreds of interstitial programs, and manages the schedules of more than two dozen FAST channels.

Wertlieb said: “Laura is an exceptional creative mind and leader whose work highlighting local communities across the United States has broken new ground for Hearst Television, allowing us to tell more original stories celebrating localism. Her focus on quality story-telling and innovative concepts has been crucial to the development of our Very Local streaming product.”

Ling has been responsible for the development of more than a dozen new original unscripted concepts for Very Local such as Finding Adventure, Maker Nation, My Amazing Cheap Date, Eat Play Stay and Plate It!, and has overseen the production of original documentaries such as Prom(ish). Her teams engage with internal producers across Hearst Television, its parent company, Hearst, and other production companies across the United States.

Fitzgerald added: “Laura is one of the most talented executives and documentarians I’ve ever had the privilege of working with. Her sense of storytelling, her innate instinct for the narratives that celebrate the people and communities we serve, and her mentorship and leadership of creative talent are all unparalleled. She is a master producer, with an eye to every detail and a mind to the overall strategy.”

Prior to Hearst Television, Ling was head of development for Discovery Digital Networks and VP of news and documentaries at Current TV. She has worked as a producer and host for E!, Discovery, Z Living and Channel One News, and her work has appeared on projects for Nightline, NBC, PBS and elsewhere.

Ling has been awarded an Emmy, a national Edward R. Murrow Award, a Gracie Award, and the McGill Medal for Journalistic Courage, and was named one of Glamour magazine’s Women of the Year. Her work on Vanguard on Current TV was awarded a Peabody, a Prism and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award among others.

She is a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles.

The post Hearst Television Elevates Laura Ling To Programming VP Of Its Very Local Unit appeared first on TV News Check.

The promotion, effective immediately, was made Monday by Jordan Wertlieb, president of Hearst Television, and Roger Keating, Hearst Television’s senior vice president, chief strategy and business development officer.

In this role, Rosellini supervises a team developing products and overseeing engineering, data, and operational responsibilities for the company’s station-branded local news sites and mobile apps, as well as its Very Local streaming apps and related FAST channels.

“Mike is an exceptional leader whose work cuts across all emerging platforms and keeps Hearst Television among the top tier of media groups for innovation,” Wertlieb said. “Among his many contributions, he has represented us well in various industry forums and is, most notably, an exceptional developer of talent.”

Rosellini has overseen multiple end-to-end redesigns to keep Hearst Television’s digital products current on new platforms, numerous CMS migrations, and continuously evolving digital video, data, and ad tech stacks. His team recently designed, built, and launched a complete suite of OTT/CTV apps to power Hearst Television’s push into streaming under the Very Local brand.

He has also been instrumental in representing the company’s digital-media interests within industry organizations, including the National Association of Broadcasters and the Pearl TV consortium of U.S. TV broadcast companies pursuing various industry innovations such as NextGen TV.

“Mike has a deep understanding of both internal and external customers and a relentless focus on driving quality experiences through his eye for product design and agile software development,” Keating added. “He is a self-taught digital technologist whose natural curiosity, coupled with a passion for video streaming tech, led him to master the various and complex functions he leads.”

Hearst Television recruited Rosellini in 2008 as director of digital product development; in this initial role, he began the build-out of Hearst Television’s first in-house software engineering team, which executed an extensive CMS migration and redesign of the Hearst Television websites and mobile applications. Previously, Rosellini managed projects for CBSNews.com, working on website and CMS feature development and early video streaming efforts.

Rosellini’s deep background in local media began with internships in the newsrooms of WNYT-TV and WGY-AM in his hometown market of Albany, NY; he later worked part-time at WMAL-AM and WRC-TV Washington while studying broadcast journalism at American University. After graduating, Rosellini produced and edited content for WNBC-TV New York’s website before he moved fully into digital media tech at CBS Interactive.

Rosellini is a certified change agent for Hearst Television’s parent company — Hearst’s conscious-inclusion training program called Include — and attended the Hearst Management Institute.

The post Hearst Television Elevates Michael Rosellini To SVP, Digital Services appeared first on TV News Check.

Jordan Wertlieb, Hearst Television president, said: “For years, Joe has been an instrumental member of Hearst Television’s technology team, working with technology partners to ensure our company is well positioned to capitalize on the rapid evolution of content gathering, creation, and delivery. The speed of change and our company’s commitment to be on the forefront of the industry requires leadership, and Joe has always represented our group exceptionally — and will continue to do even more in his new role, working closely with Stefan and our leaders across Hearst Television.”

Hadl said: “Joe’s passion and knowledge of the technology impacting our business and industry is and will continue to be a vital resource as we move the company into the future. The entire Hearst Television technology leadership team is committed to success. I could not be prouder of the team leading our engineering and technology efforts.”

Addalia, a broadcast engineering veteran of nearly four decades, joined Hearst Television in 2006 with the company’s acquisition from Emmis Communications of WKCF Orlando, Fla., where he remains based. His responsibilities have included broadcast-related technology for the company’s operations, including playout, news systems, asset management, and NextGen TV (ATSC 3.0), as well as interactive and second-screen TV and multicasting. He also has served as Hearst Television’s representative on various industry technology committees.

Before joining Hearst Television, Addalia was Emmis Communications’ corporate director of engineering technology, responsible for researching and pinpointing technology for the company’s 16 television and 25 radio stations, among other duties.

Previously he was corporate director of engineering for New Jersey-based broadcaster Press Communications LLC, where he designed and constructed the studio and transmission facilities for WKCF Orlando, Fla., which Emmis purchased from Press Communications in 1999, as well as the group’s radio facilities located in New Jersey and Florida.  He “signed on” WKCF in 1988 as the station’s chief engineer.

Addalia holds an Associate in Applied Science degree in television and is an SBE Certified Broadcast Engineer and an active Member of SBE Chapter 42 in Central Florida as well as an SMPTE Florida Section Manager. In 2016 he was honored as a recipient of the Technology Leadership Award from Broadcasting & Cable magazine.

The post Joe Addalia Promoted To VP, Broadcast Technology, At Hearst Television appeared first on TV News Check.

Saffell succeeds Joe Balkan, who is retiring at the end of this year after 24 years with Hearst Television and nearly five decades in broadcast television.

“Michael is a versatile broadcast TV industry veteran with valuable experience spanning production to distribution,” said Stefan Hadl, Hearst Television senior vice president of engineering. “He’s been instrumental in managing the technology at one of our company’s most high-profile stations and he’s the right person to succeed Joe in this important position.”

Before joining Hearst Television in 2014 as assistant director of engineering at WMUR, Saffell served for seven years as director of technology for New Hampshire Public Radio, with management responsibilities including IT, studio facilities and remote transmission sites. Before that, he developed deep experience in mobile television production, serving for eight years in various roles, most recently lead project manager, for New Hampshire-based production company Game Creek Video.

His television career dates back to his teen years; he was the acting chief engineer for a 5-megawatt suburban New York TV station when he was 18 years old.

Saffell is a member of IEEE, SMPTE and SBE; he has served within the SBE’s Mentor Program since the program’s inception in 2016.  He is a two-time Emmy Award winner in the Outstanding Technical Team Remote category, for his work on the 1998 Summer X Games and the 2002 Winter Olympics.

The post Hearst Ups Michael Saffell To Regional Director Of Engineering appeared first on TV News Check.

Stefan Hadl

Stefan Hadl, Hearst Television’s vice president of engineering since June 2019, has been promoted to senior vice president, broadcast engineering & technology.

The announcement was made Tuesday by Jordan Wertlieb, Hearst Television president.

“Stefan is an outstanding leader,” Wertlieb said. “He has been instrumental in advancing Hearst Television technology, leading our teams in the rollout of next generation television, and synthesizing the distribution of all our video assets on current and emerging platforms. Thanks to Stefan’s vision, our company is well positioned to meet the expectations of the consumer while concurrently leading and attracting extraordinary talent to embrace the industry’s important and rapid video transformation.”

As vice president of engineering, Hadl led a team that helped navigate the operation of Hearst TV stations through the pandemic both on premises and with a remote workforce, launched more than 40 additional digital multicast channels across the company’s station footprint, and drove Hearst Television’s participation in the nationwide rollout of ATSC 3.0 — aka NextGen TV — launching stations in 14 of the company’s top-20 markets with the new technology. Hadl helped create an engineering fellowship, named for Marty Faubell, his predecessor as vice president of engineering, to attract fresh talent to the industry.

Hadl is a member of numerous key industry organizations and groups, including the Advanced Television Systems Committee, the international, nonprofit organization developing voluntary standards for digital television; the National Association of Broadcasters Technology Committee; the Pearl consortium of television broadcasters helping advance NextGen TV; the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers; and the Society of Broadcast Engineers.

Joining Hearst Television in 1995, Hadl started as a broadcast engineer at KCRA, later to become part of the company’s Sacramento, Calif., duopoly, KCRA-KQCA. He was promoted to engineering supervisor and assistant chief engineer. After subsequently serving as director of engineering at Hearst Television’s WMUR Manchester, N.H., he returned to KCRA-KQCA as director of engineering.

In 2015, Hadl became director of engineering and operations of Hearst Television’s WCVB Boston. Prior to his 2019 promotion to vice president, he was director of engineering, eastern region, overseeing the engineering operations of 14 Hearst television stations as well as the company’s Baltimore radio stations.

Hadl began his career in broadcast engineering while in the United States Air Force, earning his discharge as a Television Equipment Specialist NCOIC (Level 7) at Los Angeles AFB. He holds an AS degree in electronic systems technology from USAF Community College / Chapman University and is a graduate of the Airman Leadership School and the Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO) Leadership School.

The post Stefan Hadl Promoted To Hearst TV SVP, Broadcast Engineering & Technology appeared first on TV News Check.

Prior to his current title, Lustgarten was, since 2001, vice president, technology and information services overseeing the company’s technology, information, and back-office ad operation services. Lustgarten has also provided strategic leadership for many of the company’s new technology initiatives, including artificial intelligence, machine learning and analytics; has played a critical role in overseeing Hearst Television’s cloud transformation; and has led all aspects of its information security program.

“Al has been one of the most important common threads in the Hearst Television tapestry for over thirty years,” said Hearst Television President Jordan Wertlieb. “His leadership of the technology strategy, systems, and processes as well as his mentorship of many of our colleagues, has been instrumental in the evolution of Hearst Television from its original footprint to the significant scale of today’s company. We are all grateful for the significant contributions to our company and the industry that Al has made to position all of our businesses for success for years to come.”

John Drain, Hearst Television’s chief financial officer, said: “During his tenure at Hearst Television, Al has witnessed many advancements in broadcast technologies, business models, and the operational needs that accompanied each of these changes. Al has consistently proven himself to be a versatile executive, meeting every new challenge and leadership opportunity. He has led many innovation initiatives to re-orient and re-tool legacy practices and systems to meet contemporary demands and anticipate next generation needs. It’s been rewarding to have him as a valued colleague.”

“I’ve been fortunate and privileged to spend nearly my entire career at Hearst,” Lustgarten said. “The company has afforded me incredible opportunities — such as enabling me to be a part of the team building Hearst Television into one of America’s premier local broadcast companies. I’m thankful to all those who have worked with me, mentored me and supported me; they have all contributed significantly to my success.”

Before Hearst Television, Lustgarten served in finance, accounting, and technology positions within parent company Hearst and Hearst Magazines, which he joined in 1981.

During his years at Hearst Television, Lustgarten played instrumental roles in the development of the company’s sales and financial reporting systems and its IT and communications infrastructures, among many other accomplishments.

Lustgarten also has held leadership roles within the television industry, especially focused on efforts to modernize business practices. He was a founding member of the TV Interface Practices (TIP) Initiative, a working consortium formed by local television broadcasters dedicated to promoting open interfaces to streamline advertising transactions for broadcasters and their media agency partners. Earlier this year, in partnership with colleagues from Gray Television, Graham Media, and CoxReps, Lustgarten was instrumental in Hearst Television’s investment in a Media Sales Gateway named Admiral — a sell-side tool that provides both the infrastructure and workflows to automate converged advertising sales.

Lustgarten serves on numerous industry and Hearst corporate advisory committees and boards, representing the interests of Hearst Television’s technology, security, and ad operations, and has been a frequent speaker at industry and partner conferences. In 2022, he was named among “Broadcast Media’s Top Tech Leaders” by Radio+Television Business Report.

Lustgarten received his undergraduate degree from the University of Hartford and holds an MBA from Fairleigh Dickinson University where he is an active participant in the school’s Silberman College of Business alumni program.

The post Al Lustgarten To Retire As Hearst TV SVP Next Year appeared first on TV News Check.

Narayanan will oversee Hearst Television’s linear and digital advertising operations and business operations departments and will help set the strategic direction of the company’s advertising technology and information systems.

John Drain, Hearst Television chief financial officer, said: “Preman brings a wealth of advertising operations experience and will be a key player on the Hearst Television team as we continue to evolve our platforms to support advanced advertising solutions that meet the changing needs of our advertisers.”

“Preman joins us at an exciting time for local broadcast advertising,” added Al Lustgarten, Hearst Television senior vice president of technology and information services, to whom Narayanan will report. “Brands and buyers will have new opportunities to utilize advanced advertising techniques; Preman will lead the operations and ad technology initiatives which will enable our customers and sellers to take advantage of these opportunities.”

Narayanan has served since 2013 at Effectv, based in Philadelphia, most recently as vice president of IT and technical operations. Among other roles there, he oversaw the implementation of advanced advertising solutions for Effectv’s large Southern division. Before Effectv, he was director of technology and operations for the Midwest and Southwest regions at Time Warner Cable Media.

Prior to that, he was associate director–corporate strategy and U-verse TV advertising for AT&T. He also served in key product-development positions for EchoStar Broadband LLC and SkyStream Networks.

He began his career at ASTRO All Asia Networks in Kuala Lumpur in his native Malaysia. He holds a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from Malaysia’s University of Technology and participated in the SCT/ISBE Leadership Program at Dartmouth University’s Tuck School of Business.

The post Hearst Television Names Preman Narayanan VP Of Ad Operations/Information Services appeared first on TV News Check.

Say 4:30 a.m. Saturday in Chicago. Or 5 a.m. on Sunday in New York and Houston. It’s 6:30 a.m. Saturday in Washington, D.C. — almost sleep-in territory.

Those are some of the time slots for “Matter of Fact,” the news show she anchors that has overcome those hours over seven years to establish itself over in the syndicated market. Produced by Hearst Television, “Matter of Fact” is available in 181 markets covering 95 percent of the country.

“People will find you if you’re doing a good job,” O’Brien said, “and they will skip you if you’re not doing a good job.”

“Matter of Fact” averages about 1.08 million viewers each weekend, roughly half the audience for broadcast network panel shows like “Meet the Press” or “This Week,” according to Nielsen company, which measures ratings. That’s down from a pandemic- and election-aided peak of 1.2 million in 2020, but double what it was at the show’s start in 2015.

That’s notable given that the program has no consistent time slot all over the country and, in some places, literally airs in the middle of the night.

O’Brien, formerly of CNN, also contributes to HBO’s “Real Sports,” but most of her time now is spent running her own production company. Her HBO docuseries “Black and Missing” won a Film Independent Spirit Award, and a doc about Rosa Parks recently premiered at the Tribeca film festival.

O’Brien wanted to keep a hand in onscreen television work and, when approached for “Matter of Fact,” met with executive producer Rita Aleman and found that they had similar ideas.

“The mission of the show was always to share voices as diverse as America, slices of life that people should see in order to understand how issues play out across the country,” Aleman said.

Hearst was looking to design a show that included voices not normally heard on network panel shows, where occasionally the same government official will appear on two or three on the same weekend, said Emerson Coleman, Hearst’s senior vice president of programming, who developed the show.

There was also a desire to turn down the volume. The inherent conflict of political shows “makes for good TV, but we have a different approach,” Coleman said.

“I found that I was very underwhelmed by the interviews we were getting,” O’Brien said. “People were talking about policy but not really talking about human beings. So we decided to cut out the middle man.”

To a large extent, “Matter of Fact” is a reported show. Reporter Jessica Gomez visited a hospital in Texas’ Titus County for a story on rural health care. The show profiled Emmanuel Pratt, a MacArthur Foundation fellow who runs an urban redevelopment agency that uses agriculture and carpentry to spur revivals.

O’Brien refers to the show as a “teaching hospital” of news.

“I don’t know that you can go wrong in elevating people who’ve been doing good work in difficult circumstances and giving them a platform,” she said. “I think we don’t do it enough.”

The effort to get closer to communities where “Matter of Fact” is broadcast is reflected in a just-completed project that became more involved as it was ongoing.

Like many news organizations, “Matter of Fact” and the 33-owned Hearst television stations underwent some soul-searching following the George Floyd murder two years ago. They wanted to elevate the concerns of communities that often lacked media attention.

Their idea for a “listening tour” turned into a sprawling, four-part series of programs, each 90-minutes long as shown online and edited down to an hour for television outlets that included the A&E network. The first gave a platform to citizens to talk about bias, the second reflected the opinions of people in the arts and academia. The third, which featured O’Brien’s interview with Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor about hate speech, illustrated grassroots efforts at improving relations.

The last program, released for the Juneteenth holiday last month, focused on profiling a new generation of activists. Among those featured were Tarana Burke of the #MeToo movement, Parkland school shooting survivor Emma Gonzalez and gymnast Simone Biles.

“It’s easy to go through the history books and just say, ‘Oh, here’s people everybody knows already,’” O’Brien said. “It was also very important to find people working in a modern-day context, so it wasn’t just a historic look back at civil rights in the 1960s.”

Besides television and online, including weekly “Matter of Fact” episodes, material gathered from the “listening tour” was used in Hearst magazines like Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Good Housekeeping and Oprah.

So it’s not primarily insomniacs who see the work.

Hearst executives are always on the lookout for upgrades, television stations that might want to present “Matter of Fact” more in the light of day. O’Brien lets the “suits” worry about that.

“I wouldn’t call them pretty lousy time slots because we have viewers there,” she said. “We would call them challenges that we would love to overcome.”

The post Soledad O’Brien Show Makes Impression In Off-Hours Time Slot appeared first on TV News Check.

Those were the key takeaways from Storage, the Cloud & Optimizing Content Management, which featured content management experts from Sinclair Broadcast Group, Hearst Television, Warner Bros. Discovery, Vice Media Group and Vizrt and was moderated by this reporter.

Sinclair’s Head Start

Sinclair already has a significant portion of its archives and media management in the cloud. It moved the central archives for its 16 regional sports networks to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud platform last fall and is now in the process of moving regional storage to the cloud as well, said Mike Palmer, senior director, media management for Sinclair Broadcast Group.

Across Sinclair’s TV stations a good number have already completely moved their archive to the cloud, while the remainder are in a hybrid mode where they are still migrating their legacy tape libraries. Palmer estimates that migration process will be completed by the first or second quarter of 2023. The company is also receiving and processing its syndicated programming and commercials through the cloud today.

Palmer said that new remote workflows created during the COVID-19 pandemic helped prove the efficacy of cloud storage.

“The key to all of that was to make sure the users that were operating on-prem and in different random locations as they were working from home had uninterrupted access to that content, and at the end of the process they either had the same access or better access as they had before,” Palmer said. “In most cases, they had better access.”

Advances in compression technology and better visibility into how to “tier” storage at different bit rates is making the cloud more affordable. While Sinclair’s RSNs initially stored its legacy archive material at 50 megabits per second using MPEG-2 compression, it wound up storing them in the cloud at 17 Mbps using MPEG-4, with no visible impact on image quality. With news content, Sinclair is able to drop down from a 35 Mbps production bit rate to 8 to 10 Mbps for archive storage.

“That dramatically reduces storage costs, especially over the long term,” Palmer said.

Palmer expects that the end state for Sinclair’s operations will see most operations winding up in the cloud, including playout. But he emphasized the importance of metadata in making that shift.

“If you don’t have metadata, you can’t find the content, and if you can’t find the content, it doesn’t have value,” Palmer said. “So that’s a major concern for us. Some of the content we have received through acquisitions doesn’t have a lot of metadata on it. So, we’re going through lots of processes to make sure we have more complete metadata with that.”

Hearst Stresses Metadata Importance

Hearst Television began archiving its news content in the private cloud over a dozen years ago when it made the shift to file-based production. Over the past five years it has been archiving promos and other non-news content in the cloud as well, said Joe Addalia, director of technology projects for Hearst Television. The group has also started the process of digitizing legacy content that was stored on tape or film at individual stations, with an eye to eventually moving that to centralized cloud storage as well.

That time-consuming work has been completed at about a half-dozen stations to date, said Addalia, who echoed Palmer in emphasizing the important of metadata in achieving an efficient archive.

“The most important thing is to be able to find what you’ve archived,” Addalia said. “Notice I didn’t say ‘search’ — because you can always search — but the real goal is the ‘find.’ In our news world, we’ve done very well at that. We have a good metadata set and good taxonomy to link to our editorial system, ENPS. So, we can certainly find our news archive quite well and restore [content] as needed.

“That find piece is so important. It’s not the technology, it’s the user being able to find what they need almost immediately and then have it at their disposal,” he said.

Vice’s Centralized Cloud Archive

Vice Media Group has found the public cloud to be a unifying force for a rapidly growing company with offices spread around the globe and diverse production teams including branded operations, studios and documentary crews in the field. The company has centralized its archive in the cloud with a common technology stack available across all of its locations, said Dominic Brouard, director, media engineering for Vice. It now has the agility to quickly shift a production from one office to another, such as from London to New York.

“When it comes to content management and adopting the cloud, it really was a great opportunity for us to try and centralize from many different offices into a single location without necessarily investing a huge amount of infrastructure in one given place,” Brouard said. “It’s sort of democratized the technology a bit to our offices regardless of the scale, because it meant the same technology solution was being offered up even to the offices that had far fewer productions.”

Warner Bros. Discovery Bullish On Cloud Migration

The company Renard Jenkins works for grew a lot bigger this past April, when Warner Bros. completed its merger with Discovery. As SVP, production integration and creative technology services for Warner Bros. Discovery, Jenkins is steering archiving and content management for the company’s Hollywood film and entertainment studios while helping to integrate technology with the broadcast side, where Discovery was an early adopter of cloud playout. Jenkins said that Discovery’s technology leadership has been very open in sharing workflows and steps they took in their cloud migration.

“They are definitely bullish in this area, while legacy Warner Media, and now Warner Bros. Discovery, was a little more cautious,” Jenkins said. “Especially on the film production side where cloud workflows have been explored and there have been a lot of POCs, but not a lot have been adopted in that space right now mainly because of security concerns.”

Jenkins said there are there are a lot of options for cloud technology to help WBD’s film business, including HLS [Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming] playout and using the cloud for remote editing, and that the newly combined companies are working to identify “best of breed” technologies from both groups for use on both the studio and broadcast sides. Some film production functions like high-end visual effects creation are likely to remain on on-premise hardware and storage. But workflows like viewing dailies can be accomplished very efficiently in the cloud today, Jenkins said.

While security continues to be the main priority for high-value film content, the pandemic forced the Hollywood production community to dive in and stop testing some workflows and put them to day-to-day use, he added.

“How we can do it securely through the cloud is what our focus is on,” Jenkins said. “But those are workflows that are starting to see a little more push behind them.”

Hybridity Abounds

Paulo Santos

Media asset management (MAM) vendor Vizrt has some customers that are cloud native, like Amazon Prime Video, and others like TV Globo that are traditional broadcasters that have aggressively shifted most of their operations to the public cloud. But most of the company’s broadcast customers are in a state of transition with a hybrid architecture that mixes cloud and on-premise storage, said Paulo Santos, senior solutions architect for MAM and cloud for Vizrt.

As broadcasters look to move their workflows into the cloud, Vizrt recommends they perform careful due diligence, and ideally, take a multi-cloud approach that spreads storage and compute across different vendors in order to achieve redundancy. But they need to look beyond the cloud platforms themselves, Santos said.

“One customer can choose two cloud providers, but if they are using the same telecom infrastructure you’re not protected,” Santos said. “So, you need to double-check this, such as what kind of fiber connections they’re using. You have to guarantee if you have a failure on Cloud Provider One, that you’re going to be able to reach your content on Cloud Provider Two. That’s what we recommend to our customers. There’s a very deep study that needs to be done, but in the end, you can guarantee very good security and reliability in your system.”

While Sinclair uses a hybrid cloud approach, just doing that alone isn’t enough to guarantee reliability, said Palmer, who agreed that a careful analysis of the overall system architecture is required. He noted that some broadcast vendors might put their control plane in one cloud and their data plane in another, such as their control plane in Google Cloud Platform [GCP] and their data plane in AWS. That means that if there is an outage in GCP that knocks out the control plane a customer’s application isn’t going to run in AWS, even though there might be reams of compute resources that are unaffected by the outage. Without the control plane, the customer still wouldn’t have access to them.

“So, you put things in both clouds or in hybrid, you may think you’re more secure but you’re not,” Palmer said. “It all depends on your architecture. It’s a much more complicated environment with many levels of subtlety, and you really need to take a look at how your vendors are working in that environment and what interdependencies they might have.”

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A diverse group of four or five recent college graduates will be selected for the Fellowship, which consists of training and professional development seminars, internship experience, a capstone project and a one-on-one mentoring session with Coleman. Broadcast companies will partner with NABLF to host Fellows for their internships in the summer of 2023.

As the senior vice president, programming, Coleman oversees program development and acquisitions for Hearst Television. Coleman announced he will retire from Hearst Television, at the end of 2022 after 32 years with the company.

“NABLF is elated that after his retirement, Emerson Coleman will continue being an active force in the industry and share his decades of experience with aspiring broadcasters,” said NABLF President Michelle Duke. “The Emerson Coleman Fellowship will honor his career and legacy by providing the necessary tools and training for the next generation of broadcast leaders.”

“The overwhelming support of the Emerson Coleman Fellowship by so many of the industry’s leading companies is a testament to Emerson’s extraordinary career and the close relationships he has built through the years,” said Hearst Television President Jordan Wertlieb. “This support coupled with the NABLF’s stewardship of this important program will allow the industry to develop future programming and production talent with a diversity of voices and ideas for years to come. I can’t think of a better way to honor the legacy of this extraordinary broadcaster.”

Charter sponsors of the Emerson Coleman Fellowship program are: Brooks Pierce, CBS Media Ventures, Comcast NBCUniversal, CoxReps, Debmar-Mercury, Disney Media & Entertainment Distribution, Eyewitness Kids News LLC, Fox, Katz Media Group, SmithGeiger, Soledad O’Brien & Brad Raymond, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Warner Bros. and Weigel Broadcasting.

Applications for the Emerson Coleman Fellowship will open later this fall and the program will officially begin in May 2023. Learn more about the program here.

The post NAB Leadership Foundation Launches Fellowship Honoring Programming Executive Emerson Coleman appeared first on TV News Check.

The Plex addition is the latest in a number of distribution agreements secured by Very Local, which is available to stream on Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, and 2019 and later models of Samsung Smart TVs.

Very Local’s growing roster of programming includes the national series Finding Adventure. Guided by Kinga Philips (host of Discovery’s Shark Week), the show pushes guests out of their comfort zones on outdoor adventures in their own hometown. Very Local also offers series that explore the best of what your city has to offer — including Boston Rob Does Beantown, featuring popular Survivor star Rob Mariano; Ed & Day in the ‘Burgh; My Amazing Cheap Date; and Eat Play Stay.

Andrew Fitzgerald, Hearst Television senior vice president, streaming video services, said: “We are excited to expand our distribution for Very Local’s programming with Plex. As consumers are searching out quality local content on streaming, we want to meet them where they are.”

Shawn Eldridge, Plex vice president, strategic alliances and content, said: “The addition of Very Local to Plex adds a fantastic array of new content to our ever-growing free library of content, further providing consumers with a one-stop destination to discover and stream content without the hassle of toggling between apps to find something to watch.”

The post Hearst’s Very Local Streaming Channel Launches On Plex appeared first on TV News Check.

There have been a few new IP builds by network O&O’s in major markets including NBC’s stations in Philadelphia and Boston and Fox’s WTTG in Washington, D.C. But most stations are choosing to ease into IP and prolong the life of their existing HD-SDI baseband routing systems as long as possible. Some are even buying brand-new HD-SDI gear when a routing refresh is required. That mindset is persisting even as many early interoperability problems have been solved and the price of IP equipment has come down.

A Matter Of Scale

Scale is the biggest factor in broadcasters’ decision-making, say technology vendors. While networks have the need to produce multiple program streams for various distribution outlets, small-to-mid-market stations may have only one major program stream they produce themselves — their local newscasts. And it is unclear when, or if, those newscasts will need to be produced in 4K with high dynamic range [HDR] to maintain stations’ competitive footing. So, the vast flexibility and high bandwidth of a 100-gigabit-per-second 2110 routing infrastructure may be more horsepower than they need.

John Mailhot

“In the local TV market, there are [more than 200] markets in the U.S., and they’re all different,” says John Mailhot, CTO of networking and infrastructure for Imagine Communications. “The big markets often do have the scale that it starts to make sense for IP. Even a year or two or three ago, you saw some early adopters there. As you move downmarket, the scale is very different.”

Mailhot says large station groups are currently evaluating what their “cookie cutter strategy” will be to convert their bigger stations to IP first. Then they’ll move that strategy downmarket.

That seems consistent with the approach to IP being taken by Hearst Television, which did a successful proof of concept (POC) last year and is currently doing pilot projects at WLWT Cincinnati and WESH Orlando, Fla. The goal is to identify who will be Hearst’s key technology partners going forward and to create a coherent technology plan to migrate stations to 2110.

“We are constantly working on how we roll this out,” Hearst VP of Engineering Stefan Hadl says.

Stefan Hadl

If Hearst was building a greenfield site, then going 2110 would be an easy decision, Hadl says. But the thought process is more nuanced when doing technology refreshes within existing HD-SDI plants.

“We know we have to take care of today but also be thinking about tomorrow,” Hadl says. “So, in some markets that may mean that some legacy purchases have to be made. But those purchases have to be very strategic and smart in the sense that they afford us the ability to easily do 2110.

“For example, if we have to replace a router, that router will have 2110 capability,” he adds. “It’s my gateway, and it’s the perfect place to start. To say, OK, here you go, here’s 32 IP sources, and let’s continue to move those around in the new world of 2110.”

Cost Concerns

Cost is often the most important consideration for station groups weighing an investment in 2110 versus buying new HD-SDI gear, says Jason Kornweiss, VP and GM of emerging technology & solutions for leading systems integrator Diversified. And that doesn’t just mean the initial capital investment — which is generally 30%-40% higher for 2110 — but the total cost of ownership (TCO) including training and ongoing operational costs.

Jason Kornweiss

“Many station groups, including big-market station groups, are realizing that their engineering team may not be up to the challenge of owning and running and managing an entire IT infrastructure for broadcast,” Kornweiss says. “The learning curve, and the investment required to allow those teams to transition to a new system, has a bit of a double cost. You have the cost of the infrastructure itself, and then you have the cost of training and acquiring new talent to allow you to actually keep that television station on the air. It has become daunting in some cases.”

When local engineering teams don’t have the necessary skill sets that sends a “ripple uphill” to the few corporate staffers who do, as they wind up spending a lot of time solving local issues. And hiring new engineers who understand both IT and broadcast is expensive.

“As a result, the TCO is going up, even as the equipment starts to normalize,” Kornweiss says. “There is all this operational expense that was unforeseen in the transition to the new technology.”

In that vein, Diversified is now offering a new level of support and software integration for customers that continues after new IP builds are done, as stations need more ongoing support than they did with HD-SDI.

Mo Goyal

Mo Goyal, senior director of international business development for Evertz, agrees that many smaller station groups are weighing the benefits of IP routing versus the learning curve their team will have to go through to manage the additional complexity. IP is an obvious first choice for a new facility where “you’re building things from scratch,” he says. But the answer isn’t as clear for an older facility in need of a technology refresh, particularly for a smaller station that doesn’t have very large-scale production needs.

“There is still that sort of balance,” Goyal says. “If you’re a small station and you’re not doing a full buildout, and you still have legacy equipment to maintain, you may be looking to continue on with aging SDI equipment as long as [you] can.”

Ironing Out Training

Many of the big challenges in early IP installations have been solved and the technology has greatly stabilized in the last two years, Mailhot says. He thinks concerns about stations having the technical expertise to manage 2110 may be a bit overblown and says that part of the process of installing any new technology in a facility is learning how to use it and maintain it.

“Early on the tools might have been a little rough, and there was some driver development and other things that happened that caused early projects to have a little bit of a science feel,” Mailhot says. “But at this point we roll out 2110 systems to customers about the same way and using basically the same people in the field that were installing routers three or four years ago. Our staff is retrained to know how to build and configure the IP systems, and customers learn how to understand and use the systems.”

Manufacturers are providing ways to make it easier for traditional broadcast engineers to work with 2110 technology. Adoption of the Advanced Media Workflow Association’s NMOS (Networked Media Open Specifications) protocol for communicating with and controlling remote equipment has been helpful in simplifying deployment. Key specs include IS-04, which handles device discovery and registration, and IS-05, which covers connection management.

Vendors of routing orchestration software have also come with visual displays that help engineers better understand where signals are going.

“The tools that we leave the customer with, it looks like a router, it smells like a router, it has control panels like a router, and it acts like a router,” Mailhot says. “And we support it and the way it integrates to their workflow is that it acts like a router.”

Evertz has created a new system called NATX that is designed to make configuring new routing destinations easier in an IP multicast network by having network address translation [NAT] built in.

“When switching, you have to tune the edge device to listen to something new,” Goyal explains. “The NATX fixes those addresses and does the translation anytime you route things to it.”

Once the network address is fixed for a new edge device, the NATX system remembers it and makes operation similar to an SDI router going forward, he says.

“The tools are really helping the industry to pick up IP without having to really know a lot,” Goyal says. “So instead of making a crosspoint switch, I’m subscribing to a multicast over here. That’s the part that helps.”

Supply Chain Snafus Switch Up The Market

Global supply chain issues stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic have also slowed 2110’s momentum, as prospective buyers now have to wait anywhere from six to 12 months to get IP switches from big networking vendors like Cisco and Arista. The turnaround time on HD-SDI gear has also been slowed by supply chain issues but is still roughly half the time of IP. That is prompting more customers to take a second look at HD-SDI, particularly in smaller markets.

“One of the biggest challenges right now is getting the switch gear,” Paulsen says. “It’s not less than six months in almost every case right now. So, there’s a real negative for anybody, for enthusiasm, right now. And there are other products there that can provide an alternative.”

Imagine’s Mailhot agrees that lead times for big IP projects have grown longer than SDI, though he says the smaller side of the IP market is faring better.

“If you’re looking for the big, giant chassis switches that you would use on a very large project, there is certainly a lead time challenge that is different than it used to be,” Mailhot says. “SDI is a very mature technology — everything about it is mature, the manufacturing is mature. We ship those as ordered, pretty much.”

Other routing vendors acknowledged delays in getting 2110 switching gear but say they face similar supply chain problems with their legacy HD-SDI products.

Neal Maycock

“Silicon problems are affecting our SDI products as well,” says Grass Valley CMO Neal Maycock. “Across the board, we see these problems. In certain circumstances, we’re seeing component lead times on standard video parts going out six to 12 months.”

Evertz has faced some supply chain issues and is actively working to prevent future shortages of key components. But the company is still able to meet deliveries and is actively deploying 2110 gear in several projects. Goyal doesn’t believe supply chain issues have impacted 2110 products any more than HD-SDI.

“They are all using some common parts,” Goyal says. “Most of the core technologies are FPGAs [Field Programmable Gate Arrays] that are common on multiple platforms and products around the world.”

Weighing The 4K Question

Evertz is still selling a “significant amount” of smaller-scale SDI routers in the 200×200 or 256×256 range, Goyal adds, including EQX and new NEXX models that both have 12-gig capability for 4K support. With the addition of IP gateway cards, these routers can also be used in conjunction with IP routers in the future in a hybrid architecture.

While 4K routing over SDI was previously handled in a quad-link configuration with four 3-gig signals being carried on separate cables, the newer routers can now support 12 gig on a single signal path, Goyal says. With an input/output card, those 12-gig streams can then be encapsulated as 2110 uncompressed and taken into an IP network.

They could also be compressed using JPEG-XS, which Goyal says is starting to become the “de facto codec” for UHD production. For 1080p at 3 gigabits per second, that gets the data rate into the 100-150 Mbps range, while 4K at 12 gigs is compressed to around 800 Mbs. But that strategy has its limits.

“For larger new builds, it’s strictly IP,” Goyal says. “There’s no discussion there. They’re not building facilities with large-scale SDI routers, like 1000×1000.”

Demand for 12-gig SDI is particularly strong in Asia, Goyal says, where there is more immediate emphasis on 4K production. The path to 4K for local U.S. broadcasters is less clear, as many networks see 1080p HDR as a good interim solution that can be supported by existing production and distribution chains. If the networks see 1080p HDR as being good enough for major sports coverage, then it’s unlikely that local stations will see a pressing need to produce their news and other local programming in 4K.

HD-SDI remains a cost-effective and very viable solution for local stations, Mailhot says, until they have to produce in 4K.

“That’s the variable everyone’s got to take their guess on,” Mailhot says. “To what extent will UHD [4K] happen as a side effect of ATSC 3.0, or will the predominant distribution be 1080p, and then it becomes UHD [4K] in the home? If we’re doing true UHD [4K HDR] all the way from the network to the affiliate to the home, that’s going to drive some very interesting spend pattern. That might be delayed if the in-between is to do 1080p [HDR] and do it really well.”

The post Scale Dictates Broadcasters’ IP Transition appeared first on TV News Check.

Hearst Television, which owns and operates 33 television stations reaching over 22 million U.S. television households, has long been proactive in growing IT and engineering talent within its own walls. Over a decade ago the station group started a training program to teach IT basics to broadcast engineers. More recently, it developed a training program that teaches the fundamentals of on-air operations to new hires coming in with an IT background.

Now Hearst is going one better in addressing the broadcast tech talent gap by founding the Marty Faubell Broadcast Technology Fellowship, which aims to recruit fresh talent into the broadcast industry by placing eight to 10 young graduates or military veterans at Hearst stations across the country. The program is named after longtime Hearst engineering VP Martin Faubell, who retired in 2020 after leading the group through a number of technology milestones including the digital TV transition and shift to HD news production.

Hearst Television President Jordan Wertlieb noted that throughout his long career at Hearst, Faubell was very focused on developing new engineering talent.

“We are pleased and proud to honor him with the creation of this program, which was developed to help ensure a bright future for emerging generations of technology leaders in our company and the industry by applying the type of mentorship Marty provided so many for nearly four decades,” Wertlieb said.

Under the Faubell program, current college or technical school students, as well as recent graduates and veterans, can start applying this spring for slots at Hearst stations this fall.

Once accepted, the fellowship recipients will work at a Hearst station 40 hours a week for 10 weeks and be trained in all aspects of television production with an emphasis on engineering and IT. They will receive hands-on experience in broadcast operations, engineering and IT maintenance and support, electronic newsgathering, production and broadcast transmission, as well as meeting with station leadership and other business-side executives.

Hearst hasn’t picked any particular stations to host fellowship recipients, but instead will seek the best candidates on a nationwide basis and then train them at a Hearst outlet in their local market. If a candidate is successful in training and genuinely likes the work, then Hearst will place them in a permanent role at one of its stations anywhere in the country, said Stefan Hadl, who succeeded Faubell as Hearst’s engineering VP. He thinks the fellowship will help identify candidates with the right mindset for the TV business.

Stefan Hadl

“You either love this business or you hate it,” Hadl said. “If you don’t have that desire to be challenged and thinking on your feet every day, then this isn’t your business — because this business will challenge you day in and day out.”

Hadl said that talent shortages “come in waves” and vary widely, market by market. But overall, Hearst and other broadcasters are seeing a decline in applications for open positions as the television industry competes with digital giants like Google for the best young technology talent. And that waning interest among young engineers is happening even as stations are increasingly using the IT-based tools they learned about in school.

“We have to do a better job of selling us and getting out in front of them and explaining,” Hadl said. “The technologies we’re deploying and working on and trying to develop in our business are ever-changing and expanding. It’s a great opportunity to be on the front lines of figuring out what do with NextGen TV, what we do as we migrate more and more to this IT-centric world.”

While Hearst hasn’t disclosed funding details behind the fellowship, Hadl said the company has made a “substantial initial investment” and that his hope is to expand the program in the future. He said Wertlieb has long been adamant that when Hearst identifies good technology talent, “we’ve got to find them a home in our business.”

On a personal note, Hadl added that he is proud to oversee a program bearing Faubell’s name after working under him for over two decades. “Marty’s forethought and planning for everything — and everywhere we’ve headed as a company — has been unmatched in our industry.”

The post Hearst Launches Faubell Fellowship To Find Tech Talent appeared first on TV News Check.

Cox Enterprises’ Videa software will serve as the initial back-end technology for traditional linear spot and all future development will be built on Azure with an open architecture. The Media Sales Gateway, named Admiral, will be a sell-side tool that provides both the infrastructure and workflows to automate converged advertising sales, from demand through order fulfillment, including digital and OTT inventory, traditional spot, and impression-based/dynamic ad insertion for live linear.

Accommodating multichannel, omni-platform selling, Admiral will provide a viable path for media companies to transition to converged, impression-based workflows, without needing to change the underlying traffic system. Its dynamic interoperability will ensure that orders are routed automatically to the appropriate inventory, regardless of a company’s current execution system.

“Emerging revenue platforms have introduced significant opportunities for us, but only if we can effectively optimize them,” said Pat LaPlatney, Gray co-CEO and president. “Matrix has proven to be a trustworthy partner with in-depth media sales expertise and a shared goal of advancing our industry through collaboration.  We look forward to exploring how Admiral will enhance our operational workflow.”

Admiral’s five primary platforms will include:

• Buy-Side Aggregation:A portal for agencies to transmit requests for proposals.
• Inventory Management:Provides visibility to all available inventory assets across digital (OTT, CTV) and linear platforms.
• Proposal/Negotiation:Originates and builds converged proposals to electronically negotiate with the agency/buyer.
• Order Management:Converts accepted proposals into orders and automatically propagates the required information to the underlying execution systems.
• Make-Goods and Campaign Management: Once the initial orders are sent, make goods and campaigns will be managed through the system until the final order requirements are completed.

Admiral will be developed and released in several phases. The first phase will include the Buy-Side Aggregation platform and a primary workflow for traditional linear ad sales, with a target for completion in early fourth quarter of 2022. The second phase will include a fully converged experience for traditional linear, digital, and OTT workflows, with a completion target of second quarter 2023. Development will continue to include impressions-based linear with dynamic ad insertion workflows, including a push to ATSC 3.0 execution systems, as well as advanced reporting and analytics.

Mark Gorman, Matrix CEO, said: “I am a huge believer in the potential that can be achieved when media and technology companies partner. It leverages shared knowledge and expertise in a transparent way and produces expedited outcomes and solutions that are both economical and effective while generating maximum results.

“We are grateful and honored by the partnerships of Gray Television, CoxReps, Graham Media, Hearst Television, and Cox Enterprises as we come together to develop this leading-edge solution that will support local, network, and more, around the globe. It will allow our industry to collectively sell more efficiently while also increasing the revenue to empower each media company to better create, inspire, inform, and entertain.”

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The Sinclair/Avid deal was notable in that Sinclair was looking to bring the same approach it was already using in its IT operations to news production, replacing proprietary editing workstations with virtual machines that run on generic computing power. Groups like Hearst Television and the Fox Television Stations have made similar efforts, virtualizing many of their news production systems to run on on-premise COTS hardware.

Vendors say the concept of virtualization in television operations has expanded as broadcasters look to implement it throughout the entire broadcast chain, including master control functions like captioning and loudness monitoring. And broadcasters are also now looking to take virtualization off-premise, either in their own master control hubs and data centers or through public cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Vendors are responding with flexible, software-based products that can be run on on-premise hardware, in a private data center or on public cloud compute.

Alan Young

The move to virtualization should only increase as more broadcasters roll out ATSC 3.0, or NextGen TV, services, says Alan Young, CTO of IP transmission and production services vendor LTN.

“Because that standard is literally all IP, it is possible to virtualize the whole thing,” Young says. “Not only virtualize but do it remotely, you can put it in the cloud. And that brings enormous possibilities.”

Captioning, monitoring and translation vendor Digital Nirvana is seeing broadcasters move away from vendor-specific hardware to a running a virtualized stack on-prem for their monitoring needs, says Digital Nirvana CEO Hiren Hindocha.

“A lot of our customers have moved away from sourcing the hardware from us to just getting a spec from us, saying this is the hardware that we’re looking for, it’s just a commodity hardware that we certify, and then we sell our software to run on that hardware,” Hindocha says.

Hiren Hindocha

Digital Nirvana sells a cloud-based product called Trance for closed captioning, translation and transcription. But its loudness monitoring systems for recording audio for CALM Act compliance rely on on-premise hardware residing at the local station. However, Hindocha says the monitoring of those systems can be centralized in a master control hub, even for 100 to 200 stations.

For its part, supply chain software vendor SDVI saw a big uptick last year in captioning and subtitling work for non-live programming being done in the cloud. One key driver was that SDVI’s large media customers were doing more distribution deals with more platforms, says SDVI Chief Product Officer Simon Eldridge.

“Captioning and subtitling are becoming a step in the media prep phase instead of the distribution phases,” says Eldridge. “With that goes a change from a device that monitors a feed on the way out, to a piece of software that does that function and prepares the media beforehand.”

Simon Eldridge

Systems integrator Diversified has seen an increase in centralized monitoring through several virtualization projects with large station groups it has done in the past two years. The groups moved to a “hub-and-spoke” model, with the goal being to remove as much physical equipment as possible from the local stations or “spokes” and consolidate functions at a master control hub, says Jason Kornweiss, VP and GM of emerging technology and solutions for Diversified.

Virtualized hardware at the hub is now remotely handling many functions and systems previously performed by discreet systems at the local stations. They include closed-captioning insertion; loudness monitoring for CALM Act compliance, which is done by exception; and emergency alerting (though an EAS radio is still required at the station to receive the in-market signals and communicate to the hub to insert the EAS messaging tones and alerts). Some hubs even perform encoding for final distribution to both over-the-air transmitters and MVPDs for small-to-mid market stations.

Jason Kornweiss

“The impetus was we’ve got x number of TV stations built over time with disparate equipment, and pieces of gear within the release path are in different locations and in need of standardization,” Kornweiss says. “Like, where do you put your school closing ticker and where do you put your closed captioning encoder? And it varies by market on its way to the transmitter. So, they’re chasing standardization through virtualization of as many parts of the product as they can.”

Virtualization at its base level is being able to run different operating systems on a single piece of hardware, allowing several different applications to run on a single server. But many broadcasters quickly moved beyond that to an optimization of virtual machines called containers, which are light pieces of software that allow multiple applications to run on a single operating system. The next step beyond containers are microservices, a software architecture that uses containers to build a distributed application. And microservices are how many broadcast functions are now being provisioned in the cloud.

Brick Eksten

Brick Eksten, CEO of broadcast compliance monitoring, reporting and analysis at vendor Qligent, began working on virtualizing broadcast applications back in 2009 at Digital Rapids, the company he founded. He then later pursued virtualization at Imagine Communications, where he served as CTO and worked with large broadcasters like ABC on their virtualization and cloud initiatives. Eksten sees the public cloud as a logical next step in broadcaster’s virtualization journey, based on an analysis of IT spending across various industries that he performed while at Imagine.

Eksten’s underlying math is an extension of the “3:30:300” rule, a formula first developed by commercial real estate company JLL (Jones, Lang, LaSalle) to express the orders of magnitude between a company’s costs on a per-square-foot, per-year basis: $3 for utilities, $30 for rent, and $300 for payroll.

“The idea is that the absolute costs will go up or down based on location and industry, but the relative proportions hold true,” Eksten explains.

An analysis of data center costs for broadcasters can be used to extend that rule to 3:30:300:3,000, based on an estimated cost of $3,000 per square foot, per year to run a private data center, Eksten says. That is almost twice AWS’ estimated costs of $1647 per square foot to run one of its data centers. So, the numbers only really make sense for the big public cloud vendors like AWS and Google Cloud that can leverage their compute across thousands of customers.

Given many broadcasters’ relative utilization of their existing infrastructure, the $3,000 per square foot number is conservative, Eksten adds. He says the actual number for a smaller broadcaster to run its own data center might be closer to $10,000 per square foot.

“The smaller you are, the less likely it is that you’re running your data center as efficiently as you think you are,” Eksten says. “You are not managing it well, meaning you don’t have it staffed 24/7/365, you’re not looking at all this stuff, you don’t have redundancy for your power and cooling, because you just can’t afford it. So, then it’s even more likely that if you’re a small call-letter station that you really should be considering cloud.”

IP transmission vendor Net Insight, which has long provided on-premise contribution hardware used for IP backhauls by major sports broadcasters, is addressing the virtualization trend with several new products. One, called Nimbra Edge, is a cloud-based contribution server that can be configured to do SRT streaming for an internet backhaul one day and then reconfigured to perform high-quality JPEG XS transmission over a 10-gigabit link the next day.

Per Lindgren

“You can spin it up in private servers, data centers, or public cloud,” says Net Insight CTO Per Lindgren. “You can have different instances and have ingest points and output points.”

Diversified is a big believer in public cloud technology, particularly as a way for broadcasters to quickly launch channels. The company been steadily growing its cloud business, including making several new hires with cloud expertise and partnering with some key vendors, and it is working on public cloud projects with a few major media companies. But given recent events that have shown the cloud’s vulnerability, including multiple outages for leading vendor AWS this past December, it has found some customers are reevaluating how quickly they want to jump in. Instead, many are looking at a mix of cloud compute and on-premise hardware in various “N+1” redundant models.

“I think people are rethinking how much cloud they really want to leverage,” Kornweiss says. “It’s certainly alive and well in production. In the media supply chain, there are a lot of provocative use cases to provide mechanisms in the cloud.”

The post Virtualization Expands, Moving Off-Prem appeared first on TV News Check.

Coggins will work alongside Emerson Coleman, senior vice president, programming, and will succeed him in his programming duties upon his retirement from Hearst Television in summer 2022. She will have responsibility for planning and acquiring syndicated and other entertainment-related programming for the company’s 33 TV stations and will work closely with senior Hearst Television management and station management to optimize each station’s programming mix.

“Shannon’s depth of experience in setting strategy and selling quality syndicated programming perfectly positions her for this new opportunity within our leadership team,” said Hearst Television President Jordan Wertlieb. “She has exceptional understanding of the programming marketplace and has an outstanding passion and energy for the mission of local television. She will work closely with Emerson over these next several months and is the ideal next-generation executive to succeed him in this important role upon his well-earned retirement.”

“Shannon is the perfect person to help chart a new course for Hearst Television at a very transformative time in our industry,” Coleman said. “She has the vision, business acumen, relationships and proven engagement at the highest levels to position her well to effectively collaborate with both our content partners and her new colleagues throughout Hearst. She will immediately excel in this role because she has the ideal skillset and the right mindset to enable our stations to continue to distinguish themselves in an increasingly exciting and competitive environment.”

Coggins joins Hearst Television from NBCUniversal where, in her most recent position as vice president of syndication sales, she sold a rotating portfolio of first-run and off-network NBC Universal television content to television station groups and local broadcast television stations in 50 markets. She worked closely with the NBC Owned Television Stations group and with various station-group programming executives and national ad-sales rep firms.

After a career start as a marketing associate in the consumer products division of The Walt Disney Co., Coggins joined NBC in 2004 in Burbank in the network’s famous NBC Page program. She progressed rapidly through a series of increasingly senior NBCUniversal positions in domestic and international marketing and affiliate relations before becoming director of sales in 2009, along the way earning various company honors for leadership. She was promoted to vice president of sales in 2016. She is a member of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences and the New York State Broadcasters Association.

Coggins holds a bachelor’s degree in political studies, with a minor in media studies, from Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., which she attended on multiple scholarships. While there she was a Division III athlete in softball, participated in the Model United Nations program and studied in Geneva, Switzerland, under the International Media Studies program of the School for International Training. Her interest in international studies predated college; in high school she was a Japan-America Friendship Scholar.

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In addition to his new responsibilities, Hayes, who was promoted from senior vice president to executive vice president of Hearst Television in 2017, will continue to share oversight of the television and radio stations with Ashley Gold and Eric Meyrowitz, also executive vice presidents of Hearst Television.

Hearst Television President Jordan Wertlieb, said: “Over many years Mike has been a cultural beacon for Hearst Television,” Wertlieb said. “He has particularly distinguished himself with his leadership, not just at our company but as an important voice in our industry’s ongoing evolution — such as his exceptional chairmanship of the ABC Affiliate Board. Throughout his career, he has amassed an unmatched depth of operational experience, including leading two of Hearst Television’s iconic television stations. I look forward to working even more closely with Mike as we move Hearst Television forward, and to innovate and assist our businesses to do great things for their audiences, advertisers and communities.”

Hayes was a Hearst Television senior vice president from 2013 to 2017. Previously, he was the president and general manager at Hearst’s WTAE Pittsburgh where he led a rejuvenation of the station, returning one of the company’s heritage properties to first place in morning and late news.

Before moving to WTAE, Hayes was president and general manager of Hearst’s WYFF Greenville-Spartanburg, S.C. During his time there, the station was honored with a Peabody Award, a National Association of Broadcasters Service to America Award and a national Edward R. Murrow Award, among multiple other honors for news and public service.

Prior to WYFF, Hayes was general sales manager of WLWT Cincinnati, after serving in sales and management positions in Grand Rapids, Mich.; Austin, Texas; St. Louis; and Peoria, Ill. He began his broadcast television career as a sportscaster and producer at WISH Indianapolis.

Hayes holds a bachelor’s degree in telecommunications from Indiana University Bloomington and serves on the Indiana University Media School Dean’s Advisory Board. He has participated in NAB’s Broadcast Leadership Training program and trained at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management as an NAB Professional.

Among various industry activities, Hayes is the immediate past chairman of the ABC Television Affiliates board of governors. He has also served as a director of the Pennsylvania Association of Broadcasters and was the first chairman asked and elected to a second term of the South Carolina Broadcasters Association, into whose Hall of Fame he will be inducted later this month.

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The goal is to help educate communities about the local impacts of weather and climate to better prepare them for future weather and climate events. Hearst’s meteorologists around the country will collaborate with national correspondents to generate this content for viewers.

Barbara Maushard

Barbara Maushard, Hearst Television SVP of news, says Hearst has long worked to inform and prepare its communities and markets for weather events, and wants to “double down” on their efforts to better explain weather and climate to viewers and reach those in the community.

“We’re good at preparing them today, but we think we can be better,” she says.

Some of the group’s meteorologists are new to their markets while others have served their markets for decades, she says, but either way they are “eager to play a larger role” in explaining weather and climate to the audience.

“They know what to expect, not just the forecast, but they really know what to expect,” she says. They can “dig into issues on weather and science and climate” and speak to the impacts of today and what the impacts may be in the future.

One of Hearst’s branded segments is “Get the Facts.”

“When it comes to weather, there’s a lot of facts, and there’s a lot of data,” she says. “We can tell more about weather, we can teach, we can further our relationship.”

Maushard cites coastal erosion, wildfires and hurricanes as some topics that are of interest to viewers in Hearst markets.

“We cover these things all the time, and we report in advance on them,” she says.

For a hurricane, Maushard says, meteorologists are on air for four or five days to provide the before, during and after coverage.

But the group typically has focused on the responsibility of preparing its viewers for a weather event rather than “pastcasting,” she says.

“The pastcast piece of it might be valuable to us” in that it would allow the meteorologists to take “a look back at what has happened and help explain it,” Maushard says.

The “Forecasting Our Future” initiative will examine weather’s impact on business, health, household finances and lifestyle in Hearst markets and will begin after the turn of the year. Newsgathering efforts have already started, she says.

The initiative is intended to be “multi-pronged” in that the educational efforts will extend beyond reporting. Teams from Hearst stations will also develop educational offerings that focus on the impact of local and regional weather events for schools and community organizations.

Stories will come from Hearst’s Washington news bureau, its national investigative and consumer reporting units and local stations. National correspondents Jeff Rossen and Mark Albert will report on the consumer and public policy impacts of weather. Maushard expects a combination of regular stories, group-wide specials and regional specials.

The expectation, she adds, is that there will probably be two in-depth stories per month from stations in addition to national contributions.

Hearst’s local meteorologists have access to a number of forecasting tools and technologies, including live Doppler radars as well as systems that help with modeling, she says.

“We have these incredible experts who are truly knowledgeable in the local markets and regions where they live and work. They are impacted as much as their audience is,” Maushard says.

“Weather is so very specific to that region and that market,” she says. “That’s the biggest advantage that a local television group has, is those experts and those people who can understand not just the science but the impacts on those regions.”

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A 31-year finance veteran at Hearst Television, Clark in 2019 joined Hearst Television’s corporate finance team led by Stanley Herriott, vice president of finance. Her focus has been on managing Hearst Television’s compensation practices, improving financial reporting workflows, and supporting station-related finance and operational activities.

Before her corporate role, Clark served for eight years as the company’s west region director of finance. She previously served for 20 years as controller of KCRA and KQCA, the company’s NBC and MyNetworkTV stations serving the Sacramento-Stockton-Modesto, Calif., market.

Jordan Wertlieb, president of Hearst Television, said: “Tracy has done exceptional work and has been an important contributor to Hearst Television for many years, from her time as controller at one of our bellwether stations through her most recent role on our corporate team in New York,” Wertlieb said.  “In this role, her exceptional knowledge of our stations, our industry, and the Hearst Television culture will continue to be an important resource for our stations and our company.”

Herriott, to whom Clark continues to report, added: “Since joining the corporate finance team, Tracy has successfully led several strategic finance initiatives focused on identifying solutions or tools that have resulted in process improvements and efficiencies. Her extensive financial and operational experience in media has been invaluable and will be instrumental as we continue to modernize our finance operations.

Clark has served on the board of directors of the Media Financial Management Association, and she currently serves on the Board’s Advisory Committee. She holds a bachelor’s in accounting from California State University at Sacramento.

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With this new roster of top local news groups and stations joining the platform, VUit’s local news coverage increases to 174 out of 210 total local markets nationwide, with more than 83% of local markets now covered by the service.

The company said that beyond enabling VUit to expand its selection of hyperlocal programming, the deals “also help this diverse roster of station groups both large and small, as well as independent stations, increase audience and grow advertising revenue opportunities well beyond their local markets.”

The deals also further VUit’s mission in establishing itself as a destination for local news and cultural content that has appeal well beyond the hyperlocal market. For example, VUit’s broadcast of the 2021 Iditarod Sled Dog Race from Gray TV’s Anchorage-based KTUU was viewed by consumers from 178 markets. Similarly, its stream of The Edmund Fitzgerald Memorial from Heritage Broadcasting’s Traverse City, MI-based 9&10News attracted viewers from 132 markets.

This summer, 9&10News reached viewers from 58 markets with its stream of the Michigan High School All-Star Softball game and most recently, the kick-off of high school football in Iowa, streamed by Gray Television’s Cedar Rapids-based KCRG, reached viewers in 36 markets.

“VUit has enabled our local stations to reach viewers with not only live news and programming relevant to them, but locally-produced on-demand content that viewers from across the country tune into,” said Pat LaPlatney, co-CEO-president of Gray Television, a major investor in Syncbak, VUit’s parent company. “We want every local station to be streaming on VUit. Viewers download the app to watch their local channel, and stick around to watch programming from local stations all across the country.”

VUit says the stations will also benefit significantly from the agreements. “Each member station will see increased advertising revenue opportunity from streaming ads on VUit’s platform, at no cost to the station. In this way, VUit creates new digital growth opportunities for local stations and empowers them to create a custom and unique viewing experience for audiences anytime, anywhere on any device.”

Here are the recent national groups and locally-owned newsrooms that have signed on to be part of the VUit platform:

• National media company Morris Network now streams all six of its stations on VUit that come from across six markets including Lexington and Chattanooga.
• National broadcast group Hearst Televisionhas stations in dozens of markets including Boston, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh, reaching 20% of all U.S. households. They are now streaming Very Local-branded channels from 27 markets on VUit including Boston, Baltimore and Pittsburgh. WCVB in Boston is VUit’s first station in the market.
• WSNN, Citadel Communications’Suncoast News Network, is a 24-hour news channel airing more than 40 hours of live news each week in the Tampa market. The station’s content will now be available on VUit.
• Cox Media Group.Ten stations from 10 markets including Atlanta, Seattle-Tacoma, and Charlotte have come to the platform as part of the recent deal with VUit.
• News Press & Gazettehas stations in 10 markets across the nation. The station group has signed on to stream all 20 of its stations on VUit, including KRDO in Colorado Springs, the group’s largest market. KVIA in El Paso is also joining the platform, which will be a new market for VUit.
• Family-owned Bahakel Communicationsjust signed on to deliver six stations in five markets to VUit, including its flagship, WCCB in Charlotte. Other top markets include Columbia and Myrtle Beach, both S.C.
• Syncbak investor Gray Television has added another eight stations in eight markets through its purchase of Quincy, including Ft. Wayne, Peoria-Bloomington and Duluth-Superior.
• Marks Radio Grouphas signed on to stream two of its stations on VUit, including its flagship station WBKB from Alpena, Mich., which serves the northeastern Lower Peninsula of Michigan.
• WFMJ Televisionin Youngstown is the only locally owned and operated station in the market. The station broadcasts more than 23 hours of live news each week and will soon begin streaming on VUit.

Jack Perry, CEO of Syncbak, VUit’s parent company, said, “We’re looking forward to working with these high caliber partners who create the kinds of content that in many cases appeals to viewers well beyond the local market.  They are not only adding volume, but also quality that will enable VUit to continue to affirm its position as a top destination for hyperlocal programming.”

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Embracing the cloud means paying for a service over time, instead of a one-time capital investment, which may require reeducating finance departments as to how they handle their accounting. And it also means overhauling existing workflows and processes to take full advantage of the potential cost savings and flexibility offered by the cloud, a point made by several executives speaking in the panel session A C-Suiter’s Guide to Capitalizing in the Cloud, moderated by this reporter.

Playout, disaster recovery (DR), content sharing and archiving are areas where the public cloud has already made significant inroads, while live production workflows are still a work in progress. WarnerMedia runs DR channels for all of the HBO and Cinemax channels out of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud, while Sinclair Broadcast Group plays out its diginets from AWS and is also moving archiving for its various properties to the cloud. Viacom CBS is migrating linear playout for all of its networks, including the CBS broadcast network, to the cloud, while the CBS Owned Stations are experimenting with the cloud for archiving as well as production of OTT content.

Hearst’s Expanding Use

For the past eight years, Hearst Television has been using cloud-based systems from tech vendor Bitcentral to support asset management and content sharing among its stations, with a mix of proxy video in the cloud and hi-res files stored locally in what it calls a “distributed cloud.” The station group also does file-based archiving of news content in the cloud, again working with Bitcentral software. And the group is looking to do more, including the potential move of DR operations hosted in a private data center to one or more public cloud services. Hearst’s digital team is also going through its extensive tape archives and digitizing key content to the cloud archive.

Joe Addalia

“When we crafted this originally, we had the foresight to build this as a service,” said Joe Addalia, director of technology projects for Hearst Television. “So, it’s archive as a service, essentially. That’s the key takeaway. We’re talking cloud, but really where the world is headed is to a service. That’s something we’ve been early on with archive, and we’ll see more coming into the future.”

Real Estate-Catalyzed Adoption For WarnerMedia And Sinclair

Real estate moves due to ownership changes have spurred cloud adoption. When WarnerMedia moved playout of its HBO and Cinemax channels from Hauppauge, N.Y. to Atlanta as it looked to consolidate master control operations at its Techwood campus, it turned to the AWS cloud for backup, running redundant streams it can instantly switch to in case of failure. (Interestingly, WarnerMedia subsequently sold the Hauppauge facility to ViacomCBS, which is now building its new Cloud Control Center there.)

Now that the company has sold the CNN Center in Atlanta as it looks to further consolidate operations in Techwood, Warner Media wants to move more functions into the cloud including news and sports production workflows. Doing so will cut down on space, HVAC and power requirements while replicating the functionality the company has historically enjoyed by using the Techwood and CNN Center facilities to back each other up.

WarnerMedia is currently in a number of POCs around cloud playout for the CNN news and Turner sports networks. The first step in the move out of CNN Center, which is due to be vacated by June 2024, will be to move DR functions for those networks to AWS.

Bob Hesskamp

“We’ll look at the same thing we’ve done with HBO and move all of our channel DRs to the cloud,” said Bob Hesskamp, EVP of engineering, WarnerMedia, said. “Of course, we’ll have some complexities around news and sports when we do that, and those systems are in POC. As we also look at how we cannot just save space and power but enable our team to work anywhere and have access to our video, we’re looking at cloud-based edit and postproduction for news and sports, and also moving our archive for news and sports to the cloud.”

Sinclair’s acquisition of the former Fox regional sports networks (RSNs) as part of the broader Disney/Fox deal meant relocating playout of those networks, now rebranded as the Bally Sports Regional Networks, from their former home at The Woodlands, Texas, (now owned by Disney) to a new master control center built at Encompass in Atlanta. Disaster recovery for those RSNs is now in the cloud, as well as an archive of 8 to 9 petabytes, said Mike Kralec, VP, technical operations and deputy CTO for Sinclair Broadcast Group.

Mike Kralec

“So, a big move there, but part of a strategy to take all of our archives to cloud over time,” Kralec said. “Some of the stations are still on their LTO [linear tape optical] libraries, but they’ll get phased out. They’ll get moved to the cloud. The key for us is capturing the right metadata in the process of getting things to the cloud, to make sure the archives are searchable, and you can retrieve the content quickly. We want to make it intuitive. I think it’s important that as we transfer to cloud, we’re not just transferring to cloud. We’re transforming how media management is done at Sinclair — that we’re improving the process, not just changing the technology used.”

CBS’s Cloud Forays

CBS’s stations also see value in archiving in the cloud, said Jeff Birch, VP of engineering for the CBS Owned Stations, and have a couple POCs underway based on a central content repository with transcoders in the cloud.

“It doesn’t make a difference whose edit system I have at the station, but everybody can see what’s in that bucket, reach in, use it and move it around at will,” Birch said.

Jeff Birch

In addition, KOVR Sacramento, Calif., and WJZ Baltimore are using the cloud to do live production to air for the CBSN streaming product in those two markets. CBS already “broke the cloud already,” Birch said, as the cloud had problems in handling an on-screen ticker that scrapes live data from a variety of sources. CBS tried to “back-door” the issue by sending the output of the cloud back to the station, inserting the ticker there, and then sending that back to the cloud for distribution to CDNs [content delivery networks]. But that also caused problems for the live production workflow, which Birch described as a work in progress.

“The holy grail is full edit in the cloud and full production in the cloud,” Birch said. “We’re not there yet, we’ve got a ways to go. I think everyone’s in agreement that latency is still an issue, and just the physical process of getting hi-res content back and forth in real time is a challenge, and it’s not there yet. But we expect it will get there.”

COVID Acceleration

The COVID-19 pandemic has certainly helped accelerate cloud usage through a big shift to remote production workflows. That is due both to new cloud-based editing and graphics tools as well as the more prevalent virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) software that allowed production personnel working from home to remotely access their workstations back at the station or broadcast center.

Bitcentral saw usage of its Oasis content sharing system from its big news customers like Hearst double, and almost triple in some cases, over the last year due to the demands of COVID-19.

Sam Peterson

“Fortunately, it was something that our customers were already used to doing, just not to the level that they did,” said Sam Peterson, GM of the core business unit for Bitcentral.

Security became more of a concern for customers, as connections were in many cases no longer coming from the station but from staffers’ homes. So Bitcentral has reviewed existing installations with customers to make sure the systems were “architected correctly,” he said.

A big focus for Bitcentral today, Peterson said, is ensuring the same experience for customers regardless of whether their application is running on-premise or in the cloud.

“What are we doing from a user interface perspective on the backend is to make it seamless, between what’s being used on-prem and what’s being used in the cloud,” Peterson said. “We’ve been really focused, as have other vendors in the space, to have real parity and have the operational usage be the same.”

From the start of the pandemic, CNN staffers successfully used VDI software to remotely access editing and graphics systems at the network’s facilities. In theory, they could run those same applications as an instance in the public cloud, Hesskamp said.

“As far as it goes, virtualization, VDI, is really the first step in moving systems to the cloud,” he said. “We’ve proved that we can work in these situations. Moving the feeds and making them work in the cloud, it’s the next step. The learning we took from leveraging these virtualized systems for work-from-home during COVID will really help us in transitioning these systems to the cloud.”

Last Mile Concerns

The reliability of the cloud, particularly the “last mile,” remains a concern for veteran broadcasters like Birch who have seen their fair share of “backhoe fade” and satellite outages. He and other panelists emphasized that careful network design, including the potential use of multiple cloud vendors, was essential in avoiding the type of connectivity problems that could take a station or network off-air.

“You’ve really got to engineer your paths from Point A to Point B with a lot more thoroughness and detail,” Birch said. “You can’t just rely on the vendor saying, ‘Oh, don’t worry, you’ve got diversity,’ when you find out the two diverse paths come together in the same conduit over a bridge somewhere. And it’s happened. And I think we’ve all been through that. You need to have multivendor relationships, and perhaps even multi-cloud relationships, to protect the assets’ integrity.”

To watch the video of this session, click here.

For more TV2025 2021 stories, click here.

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Retransmission rates are not in line with the audiences delivered, but if opposing sides work together, it could help everyone’s businesses, the leaders said during the Station Group Leaders on the State of the Industry panel at TVNewsCheck’s virtual TV2025 conference last week.

Top executives from Fox Television Stations, Gray Television and Hearst Television weighed in on a range of pressing industry issues from streaming to the new NFL contracts, Wall Street’s estimation of the industry to M&A activity, and even the ongoing viability of four major broadcast networks, as well as the depth of their commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.

Jordan Wertlieb

Retransmission still has “headroom” for growth, said Jordan Wertlieb, president of Hearst Television. “We have yet to see rates commensurate with the audiences that broadcasters bring to the ecosystem,” he said.

Pat LaPlatney, president and co-CEO of Gray Television, agreed that the rates paid to broadcasters “don’t square up” with the “extraordinary” numbers local broadcasters deliver.

But while seemingly “constantly at odds,” Fox Television Stations CEO Jack Abernethy said broadcasters and cable operators may yet find more common ground. For example, he said, broadcasters and union partners may often be “at odds over work rules and such,” but that both wanted safety for employees during COVID, so they were able to work together to achieve that goal.

“We don’t often sit down with our cable partners and say, ‘Hey, how do we do this?’” he said. Instead, “we beat each other up in the press.”

The group leaders also spoke to streaming’s increasing importance for their business.

Just last week, Hearst launched its group of Very Local streaming channels, which offer locally generated programming as well as content made available by magazine partners such as Delish and Esquire in order to offer a “robust” library, Wertlieb said.

He noted it’s pivotal to make a strong first impression with potential streaming viewers. “In this space, you don’t get sampled more than once.”

Fox offers LiveNOW, is launching Fox Weather in October and has another niche offering in the works, Abernethy said.

Based on experiences from cable and the web, “it’s niche services that are going to do well” with streaming audiences, he said. “We have to go after the consumer and give them what they want.”

And some of that content is football. The National Football League has signed 10-year contracts, effective in 2023, with the major broadcasters for the right to show games either over the air or via streaming services.

The new batch of contracts means a loss of exclusivity during games, LaPlatney noted, as, for instance, NFL games won’t just be available on NBC affiliates but also on NBC’s Peacock streaming service.

Jack Abernethy

“Is it ideal? No, but it’s something we’re all going to be dealing with,” he said.

Station groups are also dealing with fluctuating spot advertising markets.

Wertlieb said he believes the shortage of microchips will probably keep the auto ad market from rebounding until next year.

Abernethy suggested the rebound may take even longer, but that it could coincide with the increase in the political cycle.

“If so, it’s going to be good,” he said.

LaPlatney said home improvement and health advertising is “helping fill that auto void.”

Additionally, sports gambling, depending on the locale, may bring in money for stations.

“Betting is such a great category,” Abernethy said.

But even when advertising dollars are rebounding from their pandemic lows, sometimes Wall Street has “misunderstandings” about broadcast stock.

“Any rationality in the stock market … is just not there anymore,” Abernethy said. Wall Street doesn’t “get the fact that this past year, local news has informed the public, has calmed down the public, has served the public in a difficult and scary time.”

Pat LaPlatney

LaPlatney said in some ways Wall Street “undervalues the strength of local — and local news in general” — whether over the air or via other platforms.

Numbers may have spiked and dropped, he said, “but they are still above where they were.”

Meanwhile, as broadcast’s M&A front has once more heated up with the imminent prospect of a Tegna sale, the executives offered their vantage points on where their own groups stood.

“We’re a buyer for the right assets,” Wertlieb said.

LaPlatney: “We’re plenty busy now with what we’ve announced.”

Abernethy said there are no immediate M&A plans but called the idea that groups getting bigger is “somehow bad” a ridiculous one. Larger station groups have more resources, he said. “It doesn’t mean fewer voices, it means more voices and stronger voices.”

Asked if the TV landscape can sustain four major networks for the next three to five years, Abernethy was optimistic they all can remain competitive over the near-term.

“We’re good for five years,” he said, citing recent the NFL contracts. On the other hand, he said, 15 years could be a different story.

The station group leaders also affirmed that they’ve advanced their efforts at diversity, inclusion and equality.

“We are hiring diverse managers at every level,” LaPlatney said. “Diversity is a good thing. It makes you stronger.”

Abernethy and Wertlieb both said their groups have worked with The Emma Bowen Foundation to bring in diverse personnel.

“If you put the money behind the programs like The Emma Bowen Foundation, the T. Howard Foundation, you’re going to see change,” Abernethy said.

To watch the video of this session, click here.

For more TV2025 2021 stories, click here.

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