01/03/06 - Matador™: Managing the Broadcast Infrastructure
Published: March 2006
Commonwealth Broadcaster Handbook & Directory 2006 |
Broadcasting has traditionally been seen by many as a service rather than as a business.
For most viewers, once they have paid their license fee, their subscription, or the extra few pence on the soap powder at the supermarket, TV and Radio are essentially free.or feel like it, anyway.
And for the broadcasters, there is very little direct connection between the work they do to create and deliver programmes and the money their station gets in return. |
But just as the concept of pay-per-view (or per download) is gaining ground, with viewers accepting the principle of paying directly for what they consume, so a wind of commercial change is blowing through the corridors of broadcast enterprises the world over, most of which are realizing that they need to make fundamental changes to their business models.
They are being driven to this by many individual but connected factors: changing consumer demand, increased competition, falling advertising revenue, and perhaps most important of all the impact of new technologies. There are countless implications to this multi-level, multi-speed change process; but one of the most important concerns the very nature of the enterprise and how they manage it.
Broadcasters must increasingly run their operations like other businesses which manufacture things and get paid for them directly; in other words they must adopt a "supply chain" model and apply a far more rigorous business focus to their operational processes across the board. The broadcaster of 2006 needs to be able to deliver through multiple channels to individuals as well as to a mass audience, to implement new services such as on-demand and interactive, and to account in detail for the necessary investment in terms of value created, revenue, and profit.
In many cases, this amounts to nothing less than an internal revolution. It involves not just new technologies but new working methods, and the transformation of management strategies which have remained broadly the same for many years.
While this transformation extends across all of their activities, an issue which is of particular importance (but is frequently overlooked) is that of their technical infrastructure: the network which joins everything together into what is sometimes called the broadcast chain, or the signal path.
In many if not most broadcast environments, the concept of a fully integrated network for the technical areas is comparatively recent. Until recently (and to this day, in many areas) programme elements have been held and managed on containers (such as tape cassettes) with each process in the production and transmission process being handled by separate systems operated by dedicated staff. The connection between these "process islands" has consisted often of nothing more sophisticated than cassettes being hand-carried from one place to another.
However with the advent of digital production and all that it entails, the whole landscape is very different. Rather than being held on containers, the content resides in the "system." It is stored centrally, and must be managed through all of the processes, from planning through acquisition, ingest, editing, production, scheduling, playout and archiving, without ever appearing as a physical "object" and, most importantly, with its metadata preserved and enhanced at every step.
This means that instead of being largely if not totally the preserve of broadcast engineers, the infrastructure is now a critical factor for everyone else: creative, editorial, production, IT, and senior management, all of whom have a stake. Whereas in the past they may have had a partial view or none at all, now everyone needs high visibility of the operation. This applies particularly to playout , which can no longer be seen as a discrete process with its own set of rules.
That part of the infrastructure devoted to playout and delivery has become increasingly complex over the years. The requirement for fail-safe reliability, coupled with the need for the highest possible signal quality in all circumstances, has given rise to a playout environment in which a very large number of disparate signal processing devices must be made to operate seamlessly together. These apply to video, audio and graphics, and can include an enormous variety of functions: switching, conversion, encoding and decoding, multiplexing and demultiplexing, insertion of text and graphics, and so on, with synchronization and delay compensation built in at every step to ensure the quality of the final output.
The need for total reliability in real-time means that the signal path is invariably duplicated, to allow an instant switchover. This adds significantly to both the complexity and the cost of the playout infrastructure.
Monitoring and managing such an environment is extremely difficult. The best most broadcasters can do is to watch the final output in the master control room, and if something goes wrong to switch instantly over to the stand-by signal path before looking for and resolving whatever the issue was. The switchover is instant; finding and resolving faults can take much longer, and takes a lot of skill and sometimes patience. Many manufacturers provide monitoring and management systems, but these tend to cover only their own products and do not extend to the entire infrastructure. Automation systems (and there are many of them) do a good job of ensuring the right equipment from all manufacturers is triggered at the right time according to the schedule.but few if any of them provide anything other than rudimentary monitoring of the whole infrastructure, or any management tools which provide more than a real-time snapshot of network and device performance.
And yet in order to implement a business focus, broadcasters must gather and manage data from the playout infrastructure more effectively. There is a universal need to know what is happening, and locations, departments and managers must have access to comprehensive current and historical information.
Not to have such access is a serious liability, and for several reasons. As we have already observed, the entire broadcast environment is now increasingly joined up, and in workflow terms playout, instead of being a discrete function, is now integrated with all of the others.one could call it the delivery module of an overall media management system. It is increasingly important for broadcasters to be able to account accurately for playout and delivery performance, especially those who are doing it under the terms of some kind of Service Level Agreement. And in today's business environment every broadcaster needs to get the most out of its assets: high return on investment and low cost of ownership are issues for all.
In the telecommunications industry, operators have for some years been using a class of management tools known as Operations Support Systems or OSS, which are all about monitoring, analyzing, and managing problems with a communications network. OSS enables a new kind of business focus to be applied to the broadcast path, and progressively adds value to what in many places is still a simple monitoring operation.
It is this growing importance of new and emerging technical and business requirements for broadcasters has led to the development Matador, a new kind of technology for the management and monitoring of the broadcast infrastructure.
Inspired by the example of OSS in the telecommunications sector, Matador draws heavily on the trend for convergence between traditional broadcast equipment and tools and techniques from the IT sector.
Matador is a collaboration between the BBC and a small high-tech startup company called Fighting Bull Broadcast technologies. It is designed to collect, display, organize, consolidate and ultimately make good business use of network data from broadcast production, playout and transmission systems. Unlike most of today's output monitoring tools, which monitor only specific devices or segments of the infrastructure, Matador sets out to:
| Dynamically generate a unified real-time view of the entire broadcasting service chain, with an intuitive 3D user interface
Maintain an inventory and database of every element in the chain, and keep a full permanent record of all activity: switches, alarms, status messages, device status, and low-res copies of what was actually broadcast.
Generate historical information on individual device utilization and performance, and allow a complete "replay" of the playout operation at any time in the past for trouble-shooting, analysis and to support future business decisions |
At the heart of Matador is a Storage Layer, a database which contains a full inventory of assets and which also stores details of every event monitored by the system.
Every asset is connected to Matador by means of an Access Layer which uses a variety of communications methods and protocols (notably SNMP) to gather information from every device connected to the system.
Finally a Visualization Layer provides a dynamically generated view of the entire infrastructure which shows the layout of the signal paths, and displays the devices and how they are connected together, along with switching events, alerts and alarms, and even the signal with is put to air in the form of a video window.
The User Interface provides operational staff with a complete view of their operating environment, one which they can navigate easily and which shows all of the events which take place, whether planned or unplanned. Unlike some systems which require the system layout to be imported from a graphical package such as Visio, Matador creates its visualization "on the fly" by analyzing the current status of all the devices in the signal path. It provides a simple but comprehensive view of a complex operational environment.
But Matador is more than just a monitoring tool. Every event affecting every device is stored in the central database, and thus becomes the basis for both fault diagnosis and long-term analysis.
On the individual device level, a variety of reports can be generated on how each device has performed over a given period. On the system level, Matador can "replay" exactly what happened on the network at any point in the past, stepping through each event (switch, alarm, signal put to air, etc) and allowing full analysis.
This is a level of management which has not been hitherto available in the broadcast sector. It gives a new level of visibility to broadcasters of how their infrastructure is performing in the present, and and how it has performed in the past. But it also givesthem a window into the future, since it allows them to make informed business decisions to optimize asset utilization, based on hard data which has never until now been available.
And for instances where delivery is being performed on a contractual basis, for example in a playout centre, Matador provides essential compliance information that is hard and expensive to compile in other ways.
Matador was introduced at IBC 2005, and attracted not only a good deal of attention but a TVBEurope "Best of IBC" Award.
It went live at its test site, BBC Northern Ireland, in November and is already providing a wealth of operational and management benefits.
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