IF YOU WANT TO LUMP 21-year-old BroadView Software in with other "tech" companies, it would be a greybeard.
Like greybeards, however, it has the experience and perspective gained from evolving from an all-analog, all-tape broadcast environment to a fully digital, Windows-based, IT-powered world.
President Michael Atkin remains at the head of the company he founded right out of Ryerson University whose first customer was First Choice Canada and has seen the changes in the broadcast world from the inside as a key software vendor.
For those unfamiliar with the Toronto-based company, BroadView makes specialized, flexible, broadcast information-management software that manages program acquisition, ad sales, program scheduling, traffic, master control automation interfacing, and reporting.
What follows is an edited transcript of an interview with Atkin done by Cartt.ca editor and publisher Greg O’Brien.
Greg O’Brien: Looking at your company from 1985 until now – that’s a long time for a founder to stay with a company and to not have sold or to have moved on. What’s kept you in the industry so long?
Michael Atkin: I love coming to work every day. I have since I founded the company… I think the other piece that goes along with that is I don’t think you’ll find many CEOs of companies today with as intimate an understanding of our company, of our processes, of our customers and specifically of our products.
I’m involved in that day-in and day-out, so I think that has a lot to do with me still being interested in the challenge and excited to come to work every day.
GOB: There have been a few changes in the industry since ’85.
MA: One or two.
GOB: What would you categorize as some of the most important ones for you and for BroadView?
MA: You can hit that from a couple of different fronts and I think the underlying theme would be change in technology… the speed of technology change and the propagation of technology into broadcasting has as much to do with the propagation and speed of change in technology in the distribution marketplaces. So in 1985, our first customer was First Choice Canadian Communications which became TMN and part of Astral – and they were a single channel service back then.
As the technology – such as proprietary stuff like DigiCipher 2 for uplink onto a satellite (which let them) multiplex their signals – grew, that distribution mechanism increased their viewership and the ability to better distribute signals out to their customers, which increasingly put technology change demands upon the broadcaster itself… I think that a lot of development in distribution technologies forced the (broadcasters’ hands).
I wouldn’t call broadcasting technology stagnant then, but there weren’t huge levels of innovation between, say, the ’70s and the early ’90s. A lot of it was just incremental improvements in the base technology and the way that things were done. There wasn’t wholesale change.
GOB: You’re talking about your area of the business now – the traffic and ad scheduling and all of that?
MA: Broadview is not your typical vendor of a traffic and programming solution. We do those things but we also get heavily involved in digital asset management – the delivery, the workflow around content and control of that. So we have a much more intimate relationship with the technology of broadcasting.
GOB: Okay. Going a little deeper and talking about changes, what have been the most challenging ones for Broadview to face up to over the past 20-plus years?
MA: The single biggest one has been migration from in our case I would consider a DOS-based product – and for other vendors I would call it a character based green screen mainframe based type of solution – to a Windows-based product. We underestimated that challenge and I think just about anybody who goes through that underestimates the complexity of moving to a Windows world.
GOB: How long did it take you to get through it?
MA: Our first attempt back in the mid-’90s was not successful. We made a second attempt beginning around 2000 and it probably took us a full 24 months to really work through that. In fact, we still have one customer that’s doing the final steps of migrating off their old character-based applications to Windows.
I think the reason for that – and the reason for this being the most challenging is twofold. The first is for us, we have a bit of a unique world in that there was no direct upgrade path from DOS-based product to Windows-based product. We had to start from scratch.
And honestly that was actually the best thing that could have happened for us because we got to stop and see what were the great things we did, what were all the things we didn’t do so well that we’d like to throw away, and to examine where the industry is going. We said "Let’s not base ourselves on the foundation of technology and approach that we architected starting back into the mid-’80s but found it on something where broadcasters are now and where they’re going to be," which was a very different world… The other aspect is that Windows is at least an order of magnitude more complex of an environment to work within from developers perspective than any character-based environment.
GOB: Tell me about your PBS implementations which are going across the United States.
MA: PBS is actually divided into almost three separate projects. Two of them are kind of interdependent and one’s independent.
The first is that PBS decided to select Broadview as their product of choice to migrate off of their existing legacy systems that they built themselves and augmented with other third party products and so on for 15 or 18 years. And for them – because they are a distributor as much as a broadcaster with… 188-member stations underneath them in their local markets – they’ve got a huge weight of people to support. So for them it was truly heart-and-lung replacement. It was a major, major surgery for them to go through.
They also wanted to go down a path of digital workflow. So not only were they replacing their legacy systems for managing data and putting new concepts in place to leverage where they want to take their business in the future, they also replaced their traditional analog plant, if you will, and moved completely into a digital realm.
So, before they launched Broadview they were in a world where they would receive tapes, they would QC them, edit them up, they might cache on a video server a few days before to play out on air. But it was still largely a tape-based world. Today PBS is in a completely digital realm where they can receive content from their producing organizations electronically. They can send Avid MXF files across the Internet or they can get a show from a producer in Boston – an episode of Nova or Frontline – all delivered electronically.
Conversely they can get media sent to them in traditional tape-based world but in either case when that media hits the edge of their system it gets ingested and digitized and its life after that is completely digital which leveraged a huge new set of opportunities for them.
That was a very large project we were involved in that took us about two and a half years from the point that we signed the initial contract with PBS until that system was fully implemented and went live in April. That was a huge undertaking – probably the largest project that Broadview’s been involved in and frankly, probably one of the largest projects PBS themselves have been involved in.
GOB: And the other projects?
MA: It’s a system called Ace, which asks: What happens in the world of public television today? You have 188 member stations. If you expect that their technology is good on average for 10 years, that means you’ve got an average of 18 stations which are changing their technology each year: Going from analog to digital, replacing tape with video server, doing major technology changes in their organization.
The way it worked previously is that each one of those stations had its own engineer who would design their own approach – went to their own vendors, sourced and built and deployed – re-engineered the plant and redeployed – all that sort of stuff. And that was anywhere from a $4 to $6 to $8 million-dollar project depending upon how ambitious an individual member station was.
The Ace concept is predicated on the concepts of commodity and taking some of the supply chain management principles that typically exist in the IT world and applying them to broadcast technology – to design a scalable but basically homogeneous solution once: One engineering group to engineer that and build out a standardized, yet scalable solution that can be delivered to multiple stations, to any member station, for that matter.
Any one of the 188 can theoretically buy into the approach and the technology. So you would buy the solution, configure the options that you want and theoretically plug it into a power outlet on the wall and plug a piece of co-ax into your plant and you’re off to the races.
GOB: And cheaper for each station, I suppose?
MA: The average price is anywhere from probably $1.1 to probably $2.5 million on the high end as opposed to a $4 to $10 million traditional world. The whole concept is to improve the technology base at member stations, but at the same time allow public television get back to the things that it’s best at: and engineering technology is not where the money should be spent.
Public television generates and creates great content. So if you spent $2 million less on average at every site and theoretically if every member station were to encapsulate that, 188 – I mean, you’re talking over a quarter billion dollars of money in the public television system over a number of years that could be used for other purposes.
PBS went through a selection process and lined up a number of vendors. Broadview from a programming traffic solution, Omnibus from an automation system, Omneon from a video server perspective, Miranda to provide the branding with their image store devices, routing and monitoring and distribution services.
Now what’s really interesting about the vendors that they picked is that they specifically picked those that I would phrase are in the "new world" of technology.
GOB: What do you mean by that?
MA: It’s all IP-based technology that’s been deployed. They didn’t go with a traditional router. They went with a computer-based and IP-based routing technology. They went with monitoring equipment that can render back thumbnails so I can punch up Hawaii today and I can see what’s playing out in their system and monitor in real time their environment from a remote world because of the technologies in there.
Their video server is really new-world scalable – it’s all about storage as well as devices that can render digital streams or can render traditional analog output type of thing. And Broadview’s in that sphere. Omnibus is in that sphere. So what you see is a very IP-centric solution that was delivered.
… (T)he two big things that I would stress is that what we see – and the Ace project’s really helped open our eyes to this – is industry-wide, we’re seeing the merging of IT technology and broadcast technology at a fast and furious pace. An Ace system today is three racks – which used to be four rows of technology 10 years ago, and it does so much more.
I also think it’s very interesting that probably a third of my customers today have integrated their IT departments so that the IT engineering groups and the broadcast engineering groups are now one cohesive unit. They’ve recognized how broadcast technology is being invaded by IT.
If you don’t have a high performance Cisco or Extreme Networks router in the core of your network with redundancy built into it where you’re protecting that with anti-virus policies and other types of options around it, then your broadcast domain is at significant risk. And that’s not technology, not knowledge, that broadcast engineers have traditionally had or developed.
GOB: But they’re getting there.
MA: Yes. Another really interesting product came from the PBS technology conference before NAB. A vendor, Omnibus, showed technology which was basically a two or four (rack unit) box which was almost an entire broadcast system.
It was a video server. It was branding devices. It was automation. It was monitoring equipment. It’s all those things and was far more compact than previous technology, pushed further and further together to being inside of one box.
GOB: Which means?
I can easily imagine a world – with the rate at which storage is growing where we’ll have terabyte hard drives within a few more months – where five years from now a five or 10 terabyte hard drive will be chump change; $500 for a device of that nature. So you can see in a world that technologically most of the things that we’re used to in a standalone broadcast domain will be available for very, very few dollars and very integrated box because it leverages the scale of IT.
If the technology is mostly a computer where 100 million are made every year instead of 4,000 tape decks, then the economies of scale from the rest of the world becomes more effective in broadcasting and become more full-featured. Then anybody can take care of onscreen CG. You can do squeezes, you can do pushbacks and overlays and all sorts of seamless things in there.
Seeing that convergence of technology, it’s amazing at how quickly it’s happening and how the changing price points is allowing other people to get into the business. In Canada’s case, our category two digital specialties are examples in that space. It’s just amazing.
GOB: It changes the rules for traditional broadcasters.
MA: Dramatically. As an engineer if you’re not keeping up on IT, you’re going to be a dinosaur if you’re not already in that world.
