The change in CNN Newsource's delivery system from Pathfire to Bitcentral's Oasis has left some small and medium-size stations with a big problem. They can't easily access and use the MPEG-2 files since they haven't fully modernized their Internet capabilities and hardware. For some stations, it can take a half-hour to download and transcode a single story that they could have gotten through Pathfire in several minutes.
TECH SPOLIGHT: NEWS PRODUCTION
CNN’s Switch To Oasis Troubles Stations
Not long ago, KPHO Phoenix producers used to air up to eight CNN Newsource stories a day in its newscasts.
“Now, they use virtually none,” says Ed Williams, director of engineering at the CBS affiliate. One, maybe two, CNN stories make it on air a week, he says.
KPHO is not the only station relying less on the news exchange service these days. Many others are, too, and it’s not because of what CNN is delivering — the video and stories are as good as ever, the broadcasters say — but because of how it is being delivered.
Over the past several months, CNN has replaced its Pathfire distribution system with Bitcentral’s Oasis, a file-based system that many stations — primarily in small and mid-size markets — are not yet fully equipped to handle.
“I have not heard of anyone who likes it,” says Garth Sims, assistant director of engineering of Meredith’s WNEM Flint-Saginaw, Mich., who had to create specific software to get Oasis to jibe with the station’s data management and Avid editing systems.
“We had to jump through lots of hoops to be able to make this work,” he says.
BRAND CONNECTIONS
Station engineers say their problems are not necessarily with Oasis as a product, but rather with CNN’s rolling out the system without giving affiliates sufficient time to gear up and integrate it with other newsroom systems.
“I have nothing bad to say about Bitcentral,” says James Ocon, VP of technology, Gray Television. But he says he takes issue with being “blindsided” and having to figure out how to use the product without a proper heads up. “I don’t like surprises,” Ocon says. “This is like a bad surprise.”
Says Williams: “The problem for our side is that it was just announced as a fait accompli.”
Because Oasis relies on fully modernized Internet capabilities and hardware, stations that have not yet upgraded their newsrooms — and don’t necessarily have the money to do so — can’t readily access and use the content as they could with Pathfire, the engineers say.
In addition, content delivered via Oasis, which comes as MPEG-2 files, cannot be used as such by many popular newsroom editing systems, including Avid and some Grass Valley systems, they say.
That means files need to be transcoded before going on-air, a process that chews up time often too valuable to spare in a deadline-driven newsroom, they say.
For some stations, it can take a half-hour to download and transcode a single story that they could have gotten through Pathfire in several minutes, Williams says.
“If we massively increase the size of our Internet pipe, which is massively expensive, and put in a Ferrari of a computer, we would certainly speed that up,” Williams says.
But since that’s not an option, KPHO is simply more apt to use content from others sources, he says. “We are CBS and that material is instantly available.”
Contacted several times, CNN declined to comment on the issue. “We are focused on implementation and are not discussing our plans at this time,” a spokesman says.
But Fred Fourcher, CEO of Bitcentral, says CNN is working with stations to ease the transition to the file-based content distribution.
While stations that have limited Internet capabilities — or that use certain content management systems — may have problems with Oasis, the majority of TV stations are increasing their use of file-based delivery, which has key advantages over satellite, he says.
“The world is moving to the all file-based workflow,” Fourcher says. “It won’t be too many years before everyone is file-based,”
Fourcher also points out that Oasis is compatible with popular news editing systems like Adobe’s Premiere Pro, Sony Vegas and Grass Valley Edius. What’s more, he adds, with file-based delivery, stations can chose among various video formats.
“You got one flavor before and that was that,” he says. Oasis stations can now choose high-def, standard-def, 16×9 and Flash, among others, he says.
“All those formats moving forward, compared to just one, I think is a big improvement.”
At Belo, Wayne Kube, director of technology, says it will be two or three years before all the group’s 15 news-producing stations are overhauled to handle file-based content and easily manage the CNN stories delivered via Oasis.
Right now, only about half of them can, he says, and those that can’t are turning to other news sources.
“They are using the [CNN] content, quite frankly, not as much,” he says. “Someone has to sit there and do the steps so they have to think, is it really worth getting that story.”
Gray has had “a great relationship with CNN, Gray’s Ocon says. “We use the wire services and I know they are trying to make it easier to use.”
However, he says, since the switch, “news directors are screaming” to get content faster than they feasibly can, and without the budget or equipment to readily remedy the situation, there is little that can be done.
“It is not a pretty situation.”
Comments (14)
simon wilkie says:
August 19, 2010 at 12:18 pm
One effort in a perfect storm of file based transitions; CNN moves to bit central, DG/Pathfire manages generational change, Pitch Blue limps along. It’s a mess on the station end. For the time being, the old fashioned ways are tending to be more reliable and easier to accommodate on the station end. Old plants and limited file based infrastructure leave large chunks of TV stations with a difficult transition.
tom denman says:
August 19, 2010 at 12:39 pm
It sounds like CNN was at fault for not helping small and medium non-file based stations figure out how to integrate Oasis into a legacy plant before rolling it out. Generally accepting change for stations of this size are a challenge anyway.
Kathryn Miller says:
August 19, 2010 at 2:56 pm
with all due respect to Clyde Smith and his crew at Turner, CNN is well-known in the vendor community in adopting cutting-edge systems that sometimes become orphans. And, the transition to Pathfire wasn’t exactly smooth; one Chief Engineer told me about having to take “ER” down to analog to air it on his station, because he had no other way to play the content.
Thomas Herwitz says:
August 19, 2010 at 1:11 pm
You’ll have to search hard to find an editor who likes Avid less than me, but…
“…Oasis is compatible with popular news editing systems like Adobe’s Premiere Pro, Sony Vegas and Grass Valley Edius.”
What? That’s absolutely funny. Other than Hearst, which is currently rolling out Adobe Premiere, who in the news biz is using either Edius or Vegas? Sounds like CNN jumped too far too fast. This transition *will* happen, but it is still going to be years before it is finished.
Andrew Dodson says:
August 19, 2010 at 1:34 pm
we had to increase our ISP service to 5Mbps and system works fine with Final cut.
they did not give enough time to upgrade so their were some issues.
Robert Thomas says:
August 19, 2010 at 1:57 pm
Our experience has been of “Not Enough Bandwidth at the BitCentral end of things”. We request ALOT of content, and during the afternoon rush there is alot of “Bog-down” on the sending end. Also, we never got a discount from CNN for having to provide our own file storage for their content after they took away our Pathfire DMG server! Then there was the FlipFactory server upgrade, and the fatter Internet Pipe requirement, the download manager that only defaults to a workstation’s C:\ drive as the file destination…. Very unfortunate.
Edgardo Rivera says:
August 19, 2010 at 2:21 pm
We are a community college in Northwest Louisiana that offers degrees in Broadcasting and Television Production. Our students used Pathfire on a daily basis to pull down the CNN packages for their newscasts. We too had the “rock” dropped on us about the changeover. I had less than a week to figure out a workaround so that the students could have continuity. Since our Pathfire workstation was Win 2000 (outdated), I pulled the Stradis card out of it and dropped it into a Win XP machine that the students were using to edit with Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere. Some minor tweeks, and we were back in business. Fortunately for us we have a robust fiber optic network that can deliver internet downloads as fast as 7 GB per second.
William Cummings says:
August 19, 2010 at 2:27 pm
Bit Central makes it sound like stations are just now getting started with file based workflows. Not the case. The issue with this particular transition was the CONTRAST between the old workflow and the new one. In the old workflow, when the CNN content was in the Pathfire box here in the studio, the news people (who never want to plan ahead, we all know that) could go to the box, search for their material and have it immediately available to output to the editing plant. In the new workflow, they have to log in to BitCentral, find their material, chose which to download, then wait for it to download and go through our internal file transcode process before its available to them. Old workflow – a few minutes to grab a handful of stories … new workflow – up to half an hour to get one. It wasn’t an issue of not being able to do it, it was an issue of not being consulted, not being warned that it was coming and simply being told by CNN and BitCentral, essentially, “this is the way it is, if you don’t like it – tough.”
simon wilkie says:
August 19, 2010 at 5:42 pm
I think bill has something here – ip encapsulator workflow has now idea who is taking what as it is optimized for point multipoint distribution. My bet is that daily timings are such that there is a huge bulge of ftp prior to news show windows. There was no way to anticipate the bottlenecks until they occur. better grade of file transfer like UTD. Clip oriented workflows vs. longer form programming. Frankly, a hybrid might not be a bad idea – part files by sat, part files by ftp. Clearly, ftp will take more attention than a totally hands off system where files are populated on a local server in a point to multi point satellite system.
Frederick Vobbe says:
August 19, 2010 at 3:47 pm
Sometimes as broadcasters We make it too hard and to expensive. We are currently using Rhozet for file transfer, for the news folks that can figure it out. We have some that like to use the $89 consumer edit software from pinnacle to do the transfer or the field laptop running Sony Vegas $499 is a good tool when it is in the building. This is small market TV that has to be cheap our main newsroom edit are GVG newsedits that were thrown out by another station and yes they do not work without the intermediate steps of file transfer and a bit of thought.
Krista Brunson says:
August 19, 2010 at 4:16 pm
This is so typical Turner….dropping techno bombs on unsuspecting stations with little or no warning.
Anyone check the wires???? I know from experience CNN loved to “top” their rundowns (do they still do them?) with warnings or maybe a “slate” outlining who to call….lol
This has Ivory Tower mentality written all over it……and in a sad way brings back so many memories of how good it “used” to be, back in the days when CNN and Newsource ruled the roost.
Beverly Bundy says:
August 19, 2010 at 4:44 pm
I’ve been using BitCentral/Oasis for several months now, and my biggest issue is not with CNN. It is with the BitCentral workflow. It’s VERY time consuming, and as the solo producer of a four hour morning show I am aggravated by all the additional picayune details that take my attention away from the content. BitCentral has a lot of potential, but they really need to talk to working producers and editors about how things are getting done.
Evan Ortynsky says:
August 19, 2010 at 7:33 pm
I work in a smaller market as a Chief Engineer. I was getting mesages and phone calls and stuff about the switch about 3-4 months before it happened. After they gave me login info I tried it on the Pathfire machine, and yes as others noted, it doesn’t run on Win2000. So I switched to another machine running XP that had up to date Flash and Java and such. We use an stradis card from the old FastChannel box for our bureau’s news content and it works just fine for BitCentral CNN stuff to. It isn’t as convenient for the stuff to have to download but with the economy as it is, these satellite based distribution was probably a cost that CNN newsource didn’t want to keep paying with pathfire. I should know, I have my own C-band uplink to feed my signal all over the state and that is the largest cost in our company per month.
One option people should consider, there are 4 Stradis Mpeg-2 decoder cards on e-bay right now for $175 each. You can download a basic Stradis player from the manufacturers site. They output SDI/AES just like the old pathfire units and you can dump the content back to tape or feed to a ready to capture editor.
I think the problem here is to many engineers are great with broadcasting gear but limited in the IT world. Everything is moving to the computer based delivery and all of us engineers have to change with it….
Karen Matthews says:
August 20, 2010 at 2:17 pm
I thought Pathfire worked great. I had the same issues with Oasis as everyone else. We had to install Firefox in the newsroom, because at present we can’t run IE 7 or above to see the CNN content.. It works great and we had an old server system with an MPEG 2 decoder card and we use that for playout to our non-file based editing system. News uses a good amount of CNN content, but I think our usage stayed about the same.