The launch of digital television and the increasing consolidation of station groups have already forced many broadcasters to undertake a significant change in the way they manage their operations. As they peer into the future, most broadcasters expect the increasing penetration of digital television, whether HDTV or multicasting, to significantly impact their existing economic model. But they are uncertain as to what exactly those changes will be. With that in mind, broadcasters are looking to future-proof their plants to any extent they can. One vital piece of the operations puzzle is the traffic system, the software that links the sales and engineering departments by communicating what commercials need to run and when to the master-control infrastructure. Traffic systems have already grown considerably in functionality over the past few years as many broadcasters adopted "centralcasting," or "clustering": consolidating master-control operations in one location to serve multiple stations and thereby improving efficiency and reducing costs. The adoption of centralized master-control architectures by some station groups has spurred traffic vendors to create software capable of managing the spot load of myriad channels and inputting traffic information from multiple databases at different network affiliates. "The demands of the business have changed, and clustering has brought on a whole new set of requirements," says Scott Blumenthal, president and general manager of WISH-TV Indianapolis and vice president of regional operations for LIN Television.
展开▼
