Circa 1973, the Pink Floyd classic ‘Money’ seemed to assume a universal state of being cash rich, however in 2009 the current economic climate dictates the need for us to sing a different tune. As with all situations, there are numerous positives to be derived from the downturn as well and here are a few pointers to help get the ball rolling.
Technology Selection
These are converged times where the boundaries between broadcast, consumer technology and IT are increasingly blurred. High speed, low-latency internet and telecom networks are giving rise to attractive new paradigms for technology selection even in these troubled economic times. Consider live contribution links where a typical newscaster would do very well to deploy CCTV IP Cams from vendors like Sony, Panasonic etc that currently provide VGA resolutions and total remote control, in most cases eliminating the high recurring cost of deploying full ENG crews. If you have access to reliable 3G networks, then for newsgathering evaluate Web 2.0 options like kyte.com or its broadcast equivalent - Viz Reporter, working off 5Megapixel cellphones enabling you to contribute VGA resolution video or even go live to air from your cellphone.
Look to deploy open source alternatives to commonly used software e.g replacing 50 MS Office licenses with Sun’s Open Office would save you upwards of $10k, try Gimp instead of Photoshop, Blender3D for 3DsMax, Audacity for simple apps like recording VO’s and basic audio editing.
Look beyond the typical ‘Rolls Royce class of broadcast equipment’ like Avid, Quantel, VizRT, Thomson etc and evaluate lower cost alternatives that extensively use off-the-shelf h/w & s/w like VSN, Playbox, Editshare, Wasp3D etc that help you reduce capex as well as annual maintenance opex.
In all fairness you get what you pay for, however even with reduced functionality you’d be surprised the alternative might just deliver exactly what you need at a fraction of the cost. Get in touch with your ‘consumer side’- at the risk of offending the purists, for trade shows do consider CES and maybe give NAB/IBC a skip, simply because today consumer tech is really really hot, for e.g compared to a typical news format like DV25 the consumer tapeless Canon HF11 working at 24Mbs does a really decent job of AVCHD at a fraction of the cost. One of the cheapest ‘encoders’ you could find has to be the Slingbox for around $250 which we use extensively for monitoring our clients news channels over public internet – it simply encodes baseband HD and you watch the stream over the web wherever you are in the world! For your contribution links consider switching to MPEG-4 wherever possible, as a general rule of thumb you would pay 15-20% less for bandwidth if you did so.
Efficiencies/Waste reduction
Good times tend to mask inefficiencies in the system and a recession is a great time to revisit your broadcast chain, map out your process end to end, identify non-productive activities and make things faster, leaner and more efficient. Classic examples of waste are de-centralized facility management, multiple copies of media being made, poor media management leading to demands for more storage, unnecessary media ingest, re-entry of metadata, multiple approval steps etc.
Performance metrics like average time taken per edit, raw footage per min of on-air time, percentage of new stories that get dropped from a running order, percentage of agency feeds actually used on-air etc are good indicators of how efficient a newsroom is or the level of waste there is in the system. As part of the consultancy services we offer to our clients, we measure and use these metrics with LEAN and 6 Sigma techniques to help broadcasters achieve cost savings. Other typical examples of trimming could be strategic outsourcing, reducing the number of news bureaus, OB Vans, bandwidth of telco links between multiple sites, implementing digital archives to reduce tape library staffing and superfluous workflows, VOIP for phone calls etc.