Case Study: News-Press & Gazette
Turning Back the Clock on Pitch Blue
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It’s after 2 p.m. and the operations manager at KTVZ in Bend, Oregon just received notification of a last minute change to today’s syndicated content of the Ellen DeGeneres Show, “Ellen,” from Warner Brothers, leaving less than 60 minutes for the station’s operations team to prepare video content for on-air broadcast. Warner Brothers sends video content to KTVZ via satellite transmission as a Pitch Blue™ H.264 file and caches it within an automation server at KTVZ’s facility. Incoming Pitch Blue files are transcoded to an MPEG-2 broadcast format using a software transcoding tool and then sent to an Omneon server for playout. With a daily average of 28 hours of syndicated content and commercial ingests totaling up to 100 spots, the operation manager’s workflow must run like clockwork in order to efficiently manage all of the video that comes through the station. Today’s clips came in late. Will KTVZ’s team have “Ellen” on-air by 3 p.m.? |
A Glimpse Inside NPGKTVZ is a subsidiary of News-Press & Gazette Broadcasting (NPG), an American media company, family-owned and operated since 1951. The Gazette published its first paper in the “Wild West” of 1845. Since the Bradley family purchased the company, it has grown rapidly and expanded its scope beyond just newspapers. Currently, NPG has 22 daily and weekly newspapers, four radio and seven full power television stations, as well as 14 cable systems located in Missouri, Arizona and California. NPG provides cable Internet phone service, broadcast and commercial printing operations to the local communities they serve. With ABC, FOX, NBC, Telemundo and CW among its television affiliations, NPG serves the Nielsen markets in: Yuma/El Centro, Ariz.; Palm Springs, Calif.; Colorado Springs, Colo.; Grand Junction, Colo.; Idaho Falls, Idaho; Bend, Ore.; and El Paso, Texas. NPG’s television stations rank number one in news in the communities it serves. Jim DeChant, director of technical operations for News-Press & Gazette Broadcasting, facilitates the daily and long-term planning for each location and works to eliminate any content delivery bottlenecks. |
A Look At The ChallengeOne of DeChant’s greatest challenges is ensuring that content like “Ellen” is prepared for playback in time for broadcast. With the large volume of programming delivered across multiple facilities, millions of minutes are eaten up each year by lengthy video file conversions. For example, it can take up to 40 minutes to transcode a single hour program from Pitch Blue™ high definition (HD) files using existing products. “Real time is just not enough time anymore,” said David Montgomery, operations director at KTVZ. It’s down to the wire every day as the operations staff races to prep content since thousands of viewers expect “Ellen” and other syndicated fare on their televisions on time and without interruption. |
 KTVZ’s Chief Engineer Amador Velasquez oversees technical integrations, including monitoring system efficiency with the new rackmounted Pitch Blue Transport Stream Recorder (TSR) in the stations’ media center. |
A View Inside Streamlined TranscodingKTVZ integrated Elemental Server, a video processing system that provides fast, high-quality, and highly efficient video and audio transcoding using graphics processing units (GPUs), into its broadcast workflow as an alternative to slower transcoding options. As a result, the station can transcode significantly more content in less time. The goal of Pitch Blue™, the digital file content delivery system recently developed by leading media networks, is to expedite video delivery. In order to adapt to industry changes in file transfer, syndicators are once again shifting operations just as they did in the move from tape to linear satellite delivery. In just a few months time, KTVZ has already switched to Pitch Blue™ for half of its content delivery. DeChant deployed Elemental Server based on its small form factor relative to competitive systems, transcode speed and its ability to process large volumes of material simultaneously. There are the additional benefits of great service and ease-of-use. “Elemental and its staff have been very responsive, willing to build a conforming solution to meet our particular specifications. The transcoding speed and density available with the Elemental solution has eliminated a serious issue for us,” said DeChant. NPG’s use of Elemental Server saves time, effectively boosts productivity and creates tangible value for the company. |
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A Glance At The BenefitsElemental Server significantly accelerates KTVZ’s workflow with an estimated 75 percent increase in transcoding efficiency and a substantial cost savings over previous solutions. Its flexibility allows effective implementation of the Pitch Blue™ video delivery system today and future-proofs NPG’s workflow by giving them the ability to adopt upcoming standards and formats such as 3D, HTML-5 and H.265. The system’s massively parallel architecture can easily handle the complex processing required to transcode HD video for TV delivery as well as new media platforms such as PC and mobile. With Elemental Server, KTVZ can convert up to four H.264 HD files simultaneously or 12 standard definition files in real time for broadcast to television. In addition, the system preserves and seamlessly passes through captions and other metadata—an imperative for high volume transcoding in the broadcast world. From a business perspective, this means costs are lowered without sacrificing quality, bringing NPG a measureable return on its investment and substantial time-savings. From a viewer’s perspective this means NPG’s stations reliably deliver content into her living room just as she sits down to turn on the television for “Ellen” at 3 p.m. sharp. |
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Challenge - Prepare and package video for on-air playback |
Solution - Replace existing transcoder with Elemental Server |
Benefits - Save money and manpower |