Myers, a leading provider of broadcast management software, announced the successful implementation of the company’s ProTrack Hub & Spoke solution for the new Florida-based centralcast environment that is now providing master control services for 13 public television stations spread across five states.
Operating as the Digital Convergence Alliance (DCA) and funded by a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the new facility is expected to save more than $20 million over 10 years. The Network Operations Center will be housed at Colo5 in Jacksonville, with operating services provided by JCT Services, Inc. The DCA, a partnership of independent public television affiliates, consists of WJCT plus WFSU/WFSG (Tallahassee/Panama City), WEDU (Tampa), WUCF (Orlando), WEFS (Cocoa Beach), and WPBT (Miami) all in Florida; plus, WPBA (Atlanta, Ga.), WTTW (Chicago, Ill.), WILL (Urbana, Ill.), WMVS/WMVT (Milwaukee, Wis.), and KERA (Dallas, Texas).
“Myers has been key to the success of our broadcast operations, and those of our partners, for many years,” said Michael Boylan, President & CEO of WJCT-TV/FM and Director of Digital Convergence Alliance. “Given the reliability of their solutions, coupled with their deep understanding of file-based workflows, we had a tremendous amount of confidence that they would be the best partner to provide the management system, integration services, and ongoing support for our alliance of stations.”
“This model provides significant operational efficiencies, without sacrificing an individual stations’ autonomy,” said Crist Myers, company CEO and president. “Our ProTrack Hub aggregates communications between all participating spoke stations, processes metadata, coordinates content capture, and manages the media throughout its entire lifecycle. It’s been a real pleasure working with the participating DCA partners to help them make meaningful long-term improvement to their bottom-line.”
The ProTrack Hub and Spoke solution is designed to maximize efficiency through streamlined and automated workflows while maintaining the flexibility to support a variety of centralcast service models and individual station operations. The ProTrack Hub serves as the centralized content and schedule management system for the Network Operations Center. It houses the centralized database of content metadata and provides the tools to manage the acquisition, scheduling and disposal of the content. The Hub also acts as a service manager by consolidating requests from the individual Spokes to update schedules, ingest and acquire content, and publish playlists, etc. The ProTrack Spoke consumes services from the NOC for selected distribution channels without sacrificing individuality and local engagement strategies.
