ATLANTA—Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB Media) is the state’s leading provider of public media on television, radio and digital platforms. We operate nine TV stations and 18 radio stations and recently won “Station of Excellence” at the Southeast Emmy Awards for the third time in 2017.
Our most valuable things are the assets and content we create. As a multifaceted network with multiple platforms, it’s paramount for us to control content and ensure collaboration and continuity across all platforms. To augment audience experience and sustain our growth in an ever-evolving media landscape, GPB Media decided in 2016 to replace its aging broadcast infrastructure of siloed production, post-production and playout systems, which required significant resource time to operate and support.
We set out to source an efficient, versatile and IT-friendly broadcast solution to connect our existing systems, streamline operations and scale according to our needs and future requirements, all within a public broadcasting budget.
The Dalet NewsPack solution made GPB’s newsroom production tools and archived content available in a single location.
A CENTRALIZED SOLUTION
Following an in-depth search, we selected Dalet’s end-to-end, story-centric workflow that integrated our existing systems, centralizing all GPB video and audio assets on one single and collaborative platform. We deployed the Dalet solution in a phased approach, starting with a pre-configured newsroom system and then expanding to include end-to-end content production, distribution and eventually, archive management.
Prior to Dalet, we had no native ingest and playout capabilities, requiring us to manually manage news and program content ingest and playlists. The newsroom playout workflow required operators to manually control insertions from different servers and tape decks. With no centralized content pool or rich search capabilities, it was difficult to locate and use our high-value assets in an efficient manner.
Our first move was to install the preconfigured Dalet NewsPack solution, which included a media asset management system, integrated newsroom computer system and ingest and playout management. Dalet NewsPack integrated our existing graphics, prompters, storage, trafficking and postproduction components, connecting key systems to create a fluid workflow for us to track news events with the corresponding media, teleprompter text, storyboards and final production within one searchable media asset. Dalet NewsPack also included the Dalet OneCut multimedia news editor, enabling the storyboarding and cutting of story packages with both assets and capabilities readily available.
The Dalet Galaxy MAM platform gave us extensive metadata capture and customization. With search and retrieval capabilities, we were able to reinvigorate content use across the operation. Dalet also allowed us to streamline the closed-caption workflow by extracting closed captions as metadata, making them indexed and searchable. Operators can edit and adjust captions as needed and either export or insert into media, or overlay on the video player.
EXPANDING SCOPE
Based on the success of the initial deployment, we expanded the scope of the implementation to improve content publishing and distribution as well as support additional third-party integrations. Dalet is very scalable, so it was straightforward for us to expand the platform without having to re-install an entirely new solution.
We integrated an ENCO system for radio automation as well as incorporated new distribution targets. The integration allowed us to playback and preview our audio files and include them in the rundown and scripting. The expansion also allowed us to create migration policies for distributing content. We created a mezzanine format and automated the distribution workflows to the Syracuse, N.Y. joint master control, PBC Cove and social media outlets. This was a big productivity gain for us.
Debra Gilbert is the enterprise program and information technology manager at Georgia Public Broadcasting. For more information, please contact Debra Gilbert atdgilbert@GPB.org.
For more information, please visitwww.dalet.comor call 212-269-6700.
