|
2006
Locally owned and managed, West Virginia Media Holdings is the first truly statewide media voice. A powerhouse for newsgathering and entertainment reaching more than 80 percent of West Virginians, the company maintains four television stations: WOWK-TV 13 in Charleston-Huntington, WBOY-TV 12 in Clarksburg-Morgantown, WTRF-TV 7 in Wheeling and WVNS-TV 59 in Beckley-Bluefield.
Each station had varied levels of automation, little station standardization and poor workflow. To ensure continued growth and success, it was decided that although partially automated already, WOWK need to upgrade its automation and simultaneously enhance its capabilities from a single to a multi-channel offering. In addition, WVNS and WTRF would be expanded to add second channels on their DTV, as well as complete broadcast automation systems to ensure commonality across each station in the West Virginia Media family.
A veteran in the industry, Bill Galloway is Director of Technical Services for West Virginia Media, and in that position, is responsible for rolling out technology solutions across all four stations.
“We already had a partial NVERZION automation system running at WOWK,” explained Galloway, “however, because I had worked with two or three other automation systems in my previous employments, I was committed to talking with several providers before making a decision. I chose NVERZION after meeting with them at the NAB 2006 trade show. In my opinion,” Galloway continued, “the staff at NVERZION is very good at explaining how their system is designed. In the end, the NVERZION automation package seemed to best fit all our requirements including technology, price point, functionality and support.”
Because WOWK had a version of NVERZION already running, Galloway was able to quickly upgrade that station, add multi-channel and turn his focus on the requirements of WVNS and WTRF.
“For WTRF and WVNS, we were after a solution that could provide flexibility, but lower our operating costs,” said Galloway. “We needed to split our existing channels and automate both a CBS affiliate and a Fox affiliate for each station.”
To automate WVNS and WTRF, West Virginia Media purchased NVERZION’s NControl, powerful playlist software that directs the digital feed by serving them to air in a controlled sequential order of events. NControl automatically rolls the feed through the video server or VTR content, and produces a continuous, on-air stream of video. Because NControl can manage multiple VTRs, video file servers, and other devices directly through the playlist, the NVERZION solution will also be used by West Virginia Media to provide content to the split channels on each station. To round out the total solution, NControl will be interfacing with Pathfire’s DMG Cache Servers, VCI’s Traffic Import and an Omneon On-Air Server.
The NVERZION solution also gives West Virginia Media the ability to not only add additional channels to any of their four stations, it also standardizes the equipment opening them to the option of centralization enabling them to work more cooperatively. And, in the event of a disaster or some other emergency, Galloway and his team could run one station remotely from anywhere necessary. “We aren’t prepared to do that today,” Galloway admitted, “but by standardizing the equipment across all four stations and installing the automation system, we now have the ability to prepare for anything. I was involved in some of the Katrina efforts. After seeing that, you just can’t plan enough.”
Beyond the hardware and software, according to Galloway, the level of support offered by the staff at NVERZION is unmatched.
“Every company says they want to listen to their customers and wants to understand how to do things better,” said Galloway, “but the NVERZION team seems honestly open. We’ve had many conversations with them explaining what we want to do with our stations, and NVERZION has been right there, working through how to do it for us, whatever it takes.”
Galloway also chose NVERZION as their broadcast automation solution provider because of their unique ability to integrate nearline storage systems into both the WVNS and WTRF stations. To meet their current storage requirements while giving West Virginia Media the ability to expand in the future, NVERZION installed a 12/250 TeraStore library at each station, providing WVNS and WTRF with 2.25TBs of RAID storage, or enough to store 625 hours of MPEG-2 video (at 8Mb per second).
“Generally, nearline storage is purchased third-party, and completely separate from the automation system,” explained Galloway. “But NVERZION integrates the nearline storage into the total solution so that it’s part of it and not a third-party add-on that I would have to go out and buy, attach it myself, and get it to talk to my network. NVERZION’s approach was to not only offer an automation solution, but to offer the storage to integrate into it too. That allowed me to look at each station not where it is technologically today, but at our goals for the future.”
Once the nearline storage and automation packages are fully integrated, West Virginia Media’s station engineers can finally have the option to share content between two, three, or even all four stations, thus giving each station access to each others file database.
“That’s not something that’s new these days,” Galloway admitted, “but for West Virginia Media, that means we can now start talking about workflow and one day possibly making a decision to designate one station to record Dr. Phil at 4:00 p.m. for example, and then transfer that file to the other stations as they need it. The system gives us a lot of options.”
|
