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From centralising its country-wide operations around server technology to switching over to an integrated news production environment, the Seven Network, a leading Australian commercial broadcaster, is fast becoming one of the world’s first truly 21st century networks.


Situated just alongside Melbourne’s Telstra Dome, home of the Australian Football League and innumerable high-profile sporting events and live concerts, the Seven Network’s brand new Broadcast Centre represents the cutting edge of broadcast facility design. It is open and airy, with high ceilings, lots of glass and ergonomically designed galleries which are far more accessible and less walled off from their surroundings than you see in older broadcast buildings.

It’s under the skin, though, where the real revolution lies. In the late 1990s, Seven took advantage of the Australian government’s aggressive timetable for implementing digital television, and the inevitable re-equipping that entailed, to take a long, hard look at the way it managed its operations across Australia. “Previously we had playout centres in the five major cities: Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide,” comments David Aspinall, Chief Operating Officer. “The question was should we carry on with this decentralised model or centralise? Looking at the media landscape in years to come we knew we had to be very quick on our feet, very cost efficient, because of all of the different players that were now coming into the field. So it was decided to centralise.”

Centralisation was a radical decision for Seven. It became one of the first channels in the world to ditch tape-based playout and totally rely on server technology. It also became one of the first to structure its operations completely around the new server-based paradigm, rather than simply replacing banks of tape machines with disc drives. In many ways Seven entirely rethought, from the ground up, the way a broadcast network should and could operate. It required ignoring legacy systems and starting again with a blank sheet and current technology rather than simply grafting new equipment on top of decades-old workflows.

Due to its sheer scope and reliance on cutting-edge technology, the centralisation project has, by necessity, been divided into stages. The first saw the abandonment of regional playout, with that and presentation moving wholesale to a centralised server system based in the new Melbourne building and powered by four 8-port 75-hour servers. Five presentation suites were built in Melbourne for the metropolitan areas and, as Andrew Anderson, General Manager Group Broadcast Services says, “During regular programming off server, we run one or two operators but we also have the ability to run up to five operators during live sport. It’s a very flexible and efficient system.”

“Why a central server system?” Aspinall asks rhetorically. “We had a lot of manufacturers come to us saying ‘This is dangerous, don’t put all your eggs in one basket’. But we looked at Quantel, we looked at the mirroring, and I have to say that once the servers were bedded down, touch wood, we’ve had pretty remarkable service out of them. We looked at a number of different server companies around the world. A lot of broadcast people make servers; a lot of non-broadcast people make servers. I’ve had experience of Quantel myself when I ran a production company earlier in my career, and they were the only people that offered us a simple server solution. Nobody else could do that. They offer good, sound equipment and have a history of developing products – there’s always a new evolution taking place. We saw Quantel as a company we could rely upon to back the decision-making process we’d undertaken.”

These systems are under the automation control of IBIS applications. The control room has 6 ingest application IBIS ServerLoad that simultaneously record high resolution into the video servers & low resolution into the IBIS browse server. VTR records & scheduled records are all handled by this single application.

IBIS ClipTrim & IBIS Vista are running on 20 PCs out in the newsroom area. This allows journalist to view & do basic editing of the low resolution clips that can then be saved as a high resolution copy back to the video server. The editors can then pick up this roughly edited clip & do the final editing.

Media management of these systems is critical to facilitate an efficient workflow process for this dynamic environment. This is achieved by utilising both IBIS ServerBase media management software & IBIS ServerArchive. ServerBase client runs locally on any standard windows PC & allows the media manager to see the amount of video space available on the systems. Knowing this information in advance can help plan ahead for large volumes of ingested material especially in a sports environment such as CH7 where over a weekend there could be cricket, tennis, afl scheduled.
Existing media can be deleted or archived immediately. A simple re ingest is all that is required to get the archived material back.

IBIS ServerMirror runs as a background task allowing material to be copied from video to sever to video server or to the low res server. This can copy finished material across to the playout server for on-air transmission or as a redundant solution. Mirroring can be a manual or an automated process.

The second phase of the project is currently underway and involves installing generationQ news systems, including eight sQ servers, 72 QCut ‘journalist’ and 14 QEdit Pro ‘craft’ edit stations  at the main news gathering locations across the country.

Ingest applications  4 x ServerLoads will be used for recording material for local news and the current affairs program Today Tonight. ServerBase for media management. ServerArchive for archive to tape. ServerMirror for copying finished material from the ingest to playout server. IBIS ServerPlay used to create a rundown of completed clip & play out that material to Melbourne’s centralised system where it is reingested by the IBIS ServerLoads & used for final transmission to air.

Initially, the plan was for the news to be read locally and backhauled to Melbourne where non-programme content would be inserted and then sent out again. However, in the company’s ongoing quest for further efficiencies, Seven decided to take things to the next step. Now, four streams – one for each studio camera, plus a spare for a live weather forecast, for example – are transmitted from the local studios across to Melbourne using MPEG-2 and switched remotely in the Broadcast Centre in what the company believes is a world first.

“We’ve now installed a news editing operation in each of the markets,” explains Aspinall. “They generate all of the stories, that’s transmitted to Melbourne, it sets up the rundown in the server in Melbourne, generates the Autocue for the reader in Perth, for example, and basically someone sits in the remote control room and switches the news in Melbourne.”

Andrew Anderson adds, “We run our galleries now with four people. That’s a producer, a production co-ordinator, a director who switches as well and an audio operator. It’s quite ridiculous. We’ve got one quite large control room down there that we do our bigger productions out of and you can walk past there and forget they’re actually on the air. Compare that to walking round the galleries of other major broadcasters and it’s just amazing.”

Up and running in all markets, Aspinall estimates that, all in all, Seven is currently doing an impressive 12,000 switches a day out of Melbourne. Perhaps yet more startling though are the savings he estimates the network is achieving. “We’ve not restricted the news operations at all,” he states categorically. “They’ve got the same flexibility as they had when they switched locally, but it’s saved us a lot of people and a lot of money. At the end of the day we'll have made significant operational staff savings by centralising presentation and remote switching news. The financial benefit to the company is substantial. We’re going to get a ROI in a very short period of time and it’s going to serve us well for a long period of time.”

Anderson adds, “It provides significant savings ongoing from an operation point of view, and it also provides significant savings from an ongoing capital expenditure point of view. We’re not going to need to upgrade, rebuild, digitise or enhance three or four control rooms around the network year-on-year, so there are as-yet unquantifiable savings there too.”

Aspinall admits that Seven has pushed both equipment and people to the limit to get the current system up and running. The hard graft is largely behind them now, however, and the company can start to reap the benefits of its technology leap. Its media management system means that once a programme has been ingested, prepared and put into the archive, every time that it needs to go to air during its rights period simply involves a file move to the transmission server. In each of its five markets Seven has servers for programmes and commercials – giving it access to immediate and very flexible programming changes on a city-by-city basis without being tied to a network feed. And there has been a notable increase in picture quality as playout has switched from tape to the server system.

“The paradox of the design we’ve gone down is that we’ve increased our flexibility by centralising,” says Anderson. “For instance, in live programmes, all of our commercial breaks in all five markets roll with a one-second pre-roll and one person pressing the button, which has been on the wish-list as long as I’ve been in television.”

It’s not in Seven or Aspinall’s nature to stand still. Centralised presentation suites for its seven Queensland markets were implemented in Melbourne in early August. Also an 8,500-hour archive is currently being tested.
 
Aspinall has long been an innovator. At one stage of his long career in the top echelons of the Australian media industry, he was the first to introduce colour printing presses to the Australian newspaper industry, beating such luminaries as Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch to the punch. He sees the broadcast industry’s move to server-based systems as being akin to the newspapers’ giving up hot metal and moving to desktop publishing; not an easy process but necessary for the long-term health of the business.

“When you’re putting in any new system there are always issues, but I just have to say that Quantel has responded extremely well to them and it’s gone extremely well in my view,” Aspinall concludes. To see how [Research Director] Paul Kellar and his team respond to issues gives you an insight into their creativity, and that says a hell of a lot about the company.”