‘Use CNN and BBC as models for Tapeless’

Chris Forrester

CNN and the BBC were praised by panellists at a recent Rapid TV News Round Table as being the ideal models for successful adoption of Tapeless Workflow in their engineering and editorial systems. But not every broadcaster is of CNN’s size, or has the sort of budget that the BBC can spend. Our experts advise how smaller players can also make cost-saving changes.

Bob Gentry, associate director at Marquis Consulting, says getting the specification right is no longer the job just of the Chief Engineer at a broadcast station. He joked that he now risked being lynched by all the Chief Engineers he had worked with! “Certainly the CE is a very important component of the team, as is the CIO, the Chief Information Officer. They are important because they are able to understand the boundaries of current technology. But starting from the beginning, designing the workflow process from the beginning, has to be the end user, the end editorial creative production user, hand in hand with the business. It has to be driven that way because increasingly as you enter the IT networked world you’re entering a world whereby the technology process should be invisible and the technology solution has to match the business requirement, as opposed to [the traditional broadcasting method] in the 35 years I’ve been lucky enough to be in it. It has always been ‘we’d like to do more but the technology wasn’t quite with us’, now that’s not the case, now the technology can allow lots of things.”

Asked whether there were ‘short cuts’ or whether it would be “commercial suicide” to ignore these lessons, Gentry was adamant. “I’m a consultant so I will say this, but the issue here is to be as unbiased as possible in getting the business to think about what they’d like to do, and a lot of businesses at the deeper levels don’t know as much about what they do as they think they do, not because they’re doing anything wrong, but because they’ve grown in an organic way and down here, the librarian who's been there for about ten years, probably knows an awful lot. The key is to open the dialogue with the business in a way that lets them think it through earlier. Moving into Tapeless Workflow is a journey.”