Proprietary Tech Gives Way To Most Efficient

With the business rapidly transforming, broadcasters say they are increasingly investing in technology that is platform- and owner-agnostic.

“We are shifting from a world that was largely [built on] artisanal architecture … and that is such a profound shift,” said the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.’s Fred Mattocks, explaining that today broadcasting’s systems need to be “all about efficiency.”

“It’s not the same world where we bought a custom piece of hardware. At the end of the day, the most important thing is workflow.”

Mattock’s comments were part of a panel discussion Thursday about how business trends influence technological investments at the CCW-SATCON conference in New York.

Mattocks, along with HBO’s Diane Tryneski, Fox Networks’ Richard Friedel and Sinclair’s Del Parks, said the importance of having adaptable and widely used technology is becoming more important as the demands of the industry continually change.

Tryneski said that HBO had to get over the idea that it needed to have proprietary systems in order to be more efficient keeping up with consumer demands, including multi-platform content delivery.

“We had to get over thinking we were special,” she said. “It is in our best interest to buy something that others want as well because you want it to be developed.”

Panelists also said that technology has to be more adaptable than it used to be, so that it can keep up with rapid changes.

“I want to end up in a world where I don’t care who the vendor is, or what format we’re [working with] or what standard,” Friedel said. He added that although he knows “that is not reality,” he does not believe what any one company is doing so far outweighs the others.

When it comes down to it, broadcasters are doing many of the same things, regardless of their hardware or software, he said. “When you fundamentally get down to it, an editing session is still an editing session, and trying to move content from one of the plant to the other is still trying to move content from one end of the plant to the other.”

Read more CCW-SATCON coverage here.