Whats ahead on 8.2 and 8.3: Its worth telling viewers now March 1, 2010
By Steve Behrens Current.org http://www.current.org/audience/aud1004multicast.shtml After existing for years in obscurity marooned somewhere in the future digital multicast channels are becoming part of public TVs real life. Though the audiences are tiny, even by public TVs standards, some have grown enough to be detectable by Nielsen. In Phoenix, KAETs managers decided last year it was time to get serious about making the channels better known. The station now devotes 10 seconds of every station break to an animated graphic lineup showing whats coming up on all three of its channels the main one, Eight HD on Channel 8.1, plus versions of two national channels, Create and World, on Channels 8.2 and 8.3. The Phoenix station cant afford to buy Nielsen data for the two extra channels, but a half-dozen stations are subscribing for theirs. In November, those new channels, about two per station, together added an average of 28 percent to their main signals weekly cume in November, TRAC Media Services calculated. On average, a multicast channel caught 7.3 percent of households during a week, full-day, or 3.3 percent in primetime, TRAC said. Were delivering three channels into the market, not just one, says General Manager Kelly McCullough. If were not measuring the aggregate audience across all the channels, were doing ourselves an injustice. When KAET first created its trichannel crosspromotion lineup last year, the staff had to enter the schedule data by hand. The work reminded station spokesperson Susan Soto of tasks assigned to her when she was new to public TV. To reduce that never-ending labor of typing lineups for every hour of the schedule, and to keep it accurate, KAET technicians devised a way to automatically generate the graphics with data from the same computer that puts the shows on the air. Across the country, near Washington, D.C., WETA-TV Station Manager Kevin Harris sounds interested to hear about what KAET rigged up. WETA also airs coming-up blurbs for its multicasts, but its staffers have to enter the information by keyboard twice, in different departments, Harris says. Harris believes D.C.-area viewers are finding the new WETA channels. He expects hell start buying Nielsen ratings next year to see what viewers like. In the meantime, Harris is crosspromoting diligently. After every kids show, WETA reminds viewers that theres something else of interest coming up right now on its WETA Kids channel. The message is especially important at 5 p.m., when the main channel goes adult but WETA Kids keeps on. Making it automagical Getting an automated display of information such as a TV schedule would be nothing special for blogging software that has a price of $0 on the Web, but it required some imagination and teamwork to pull it off in a multimillion-dollar broadcast plant. The animated graphics, created early last year in Adobe After Effects, used JavaScript to grab the data from a manually created text file. The obvious next step, KAET technicians decided, was to automate the process by extracting the schedule info from Myers Information Systems ProTrack scheduling software, used by the Phoenix station and many others, and feeding it to the graphics program. And the easiest way to do that was to use ProTracks ODBC (Open Data Base Connectivity), says Adam Draper, the stations web developer. KAET orders ProTrack to generate a nonpublic web page, just for this purpose, which in turn exports a text file that the graphics software can read. It was just a matter of getting connectivity. It wasnt a big deal, recalls Draper. IT analyst Nic Desjardins agrees: I think we got it on the first try. ================================================= George Antunes Voice (713) 743-3923 Associate Professor Fax (713) 743-3927 Political Science Internet: antunes at uh dot edu University of Houston Houston, TX 77204-3011 _______________________________________________ Medianews mailing list [email protected] http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
