Neo Sports, the cricket only channel has equipped itself with Fore TV Broadcast Management System from MSA Focus to streamline operations and gain eyeballs during the upcoming India-Australia series in October. Neo Sports has gained the telecast rights for the series.

The lenghty turnaround cycle

"Fore TV is the first deployment of any kind of Broadcast Management System by Neo Sports, before this it was all done on an Excel sheet", said Wojciech Rutkowski, consultant- Technical & Operations, MSA Focus.

There was a team of six to eight people working on the Excel sheet. The promos team prepared twenty-five promos a month and passed it on to the producers who after giving the final shape to the promos, forwarded the same to the schedulers enabling them to prepare the final database. The same information was stored on seven to eight PCs and if the information was not passed on to the next department, the work would suffer.

Fore TV comes to the fore

To overcome this hurdle, Fore TV provided a common platform for all the sub-activities of the workflow. "Fore TV is not a big system. It is a system which is universal and allows a lot of tweaking and hence scores over other systems in the market," mentions Rutkowski.

The system not only facilitates the production and transmission but also calculates invoices and incomes from various streams like IPTV, VOD, advertising, sponsership, pay-per-view, interactive TV, sponsorship, etc.

"The Fore TV Broadcast Management System makes scheduling easier and that applies to programmes, promotions and commercials," adds Rutkowski.

The programmes are listed according to the license and country. The programmes can even be dragged to the required time slots and can be re-telecasted as many times according to the settings made on a daily, monthly or yearly basis. The system also does automated scheduling when there is a programme change.

One of the biggest challenges during the deployment was the way ad-agencies work in India and other countries where Neo Sports is operational. In other countries, all the ad agencies directly post their advertisements to the assigned server, while in India they are done separately.

Facilitating the workflow

Apart from scheduling, Fore TV has an important part to play in the typical workflow of broadcasting. The tapes for transmission or immediate use are done on the file system. The system knows what server it will use, is it ready for transmission and also checks the quality. The producer fixes any discrepancies in the quality and manages the workflow through the production cycle.

On the actual transmission date, the system calculates all the costs. Amortisation is done if a client’s advertisement is not covered for the fixed time slot. After all the calculations, the data is transported to the financial systems. At the month end, all the data is tallied to check for any discrepancies. However, the financial system is not installed yet and would be operational by next month.

In the above process, the role of cult generation is very important. Cults are basically ID numbers assigned to the data to link it to the right system. One system generates it and tells it to the other system, which reads it in the same way as it is transported.