DIS-covery Trends Report – Broadcast Automation

The DIS-covery Trends Report: Automation is derived from our most recently published Broadcast Automation World tm 2007 that came out in January 2008. That report, in its full version, intended mainly for manufacturers also includes product data, brand shares and brand image rankings as well as greater depth of detail, generally. The full report, BAW 2007 is one of the most popular reports in the server industry, subscribed to by most of the major manufacturers.

What the DIS-covery report on Automation gives you is, lots of technology trends information, budgets and revenues, shows and magazines, classification, applications, purchase sources, as well as a key to what the major trends are that are most moving the marketplace. (Price $400USD)

Executive Summary

Lots of Options
The industry supports more than 45 active firms as suppliers, although only about 25-28 of them account for enough to show up on the radar screen of a report such as ours but perhaps as few as 7-10 are truly meaningful players. That said, we have forecast a gradual market decline over the next five years, as both units and dollars fall in the sector. This is, at least in short term, caused by continual pressure on prices on an average and putative saturation of some applications and user segments, reflected in our 5-year forecast. This is particularly vivid in Play-out. This decline is offset mainly by the demand for control of additional channels, but also by the digital/HD build-out and technological upgrades. We steadfastly feel that, beyond the immediate few years ahead, there will be – as there has been in servers as an example – a rebounding and new surge of automation activity further on. Prices will be softer, however, and we doubt that the market will throw off the sort of dollars it did in the initial acceptance of the technology, over the past decades.

In a global marketplace with as many installed units as this one, and so many years of active technology acquisition, the maturity has caused a slowing of the purchase of systems. Therefore, each year is tending to see a ‘turn’ of about 10-15% of the installed units. Some of this is clearly, at this advanced stage, due to replacement of ageing systems, some to a gentle building out of the workflows by adding channel capacity. Yet more changes – and sales - are due to the accommodation of digital infrastructure and HD requirements.

Seeing automation in a proper context
Further, to best understand TV automation is to see it in context, and that means in relationship to not only the growing urge to curtail labor costs and as well to mechanize the workflow, but also to see the links to servers, storage, library management and the re-deployment of media assets, and more recently the drive to further monetize media assets. Just as the types of automation vary, their place in the workflow is quite mixed. Nonetheless, the most common trends are as follows: a) automation that is tied to servers, video storage and the like, in combined or hybridized systems and b) automation with pure device control. Generally, the newest trend in automation is towards hybridized – or what we call Combined Use – control within workflows, rather than a single application like Play-out. Therefore, by the nature of this sort of hybridization, many varied third-party devices are ganged up to deploy such systems today. Despite the huge and growing numbers of Mac-related systems today, automation systems tend to be Windows-centric. And, that ties in well with the many Windows-centric storage systems (see also our Video Storage World tm 2007 report and Broadcast Servers World tm 2007 report, respectively), as they are deployed within multi-faceted workflows. Asset management and the art of media asset re-deployment and re-purposing have barely been tried, although it is becoming a popular next step in the future vision of many broadcasters. Typical in many such systems, however, are unified trans-coding, which helps to smooth the rich media re-deployment going on.

Automation as it is today
The traditional automation was most often Play-out-centric, and as such, feature sets often focused on Play-out, Ingest, Multiple Device Control and Media Transfer with a pinch of Redundancy. Also heavily driving the use of the technology has been the need to re-purpose ‘rich’ media and the demand to further monetize investments, sometimes as new channels, sometimes as entirely new services. But, the traditional models are rapidly being displaced or at least challenged by mobile services, VOD (and/or NVOD), Internet broadband and DSL requirements. Telco players are elbowing in on distribution and broadcasters are finding that they must re-vamp by creating contribution platforms that will allow them to expand feeds to the other networks. Today there are new organizational issues that impact automation planning, but the impetus remains that of lowering labor costs and streamlining operations. But, now creation of entirely new businesses and revenue streams has become just as important. Another subtle aspect is the loss of limitations or borders between uses. There are competitors and then there are competitors. Not more than 7 to 10 manufacturing firms really matter in large numerical terms. The rest are relatively small players. An area of interest as things progress is that of new (or enhanced) distribution where not many players are strong and yet the need growing. Some brands such as Fission, Microfirst, SGT and Ibis have features that enable them to take advantage of this growth area.

Standard setting
Standard setting activity has helped to further codify the industry-wide approach to automation implementation. In particular, SMPTE S22-10 has begun to ripple through the global market and to help users to correlate the transfer of logs, schedules, billings and ad proofs and metadata between stations and other automation sites. Popularly called BXF, this standard is not universally accepted yet, but growing rapidly in use. There is no doubt that this standardization enables greater integration and fosters more sales or increased system capacities.

New eyeballs, can mean new channels and new automation sales
Despite the current decline we have forecast, both in unit/channel and dollar terms, and our belief that the decline will continue in the next five years, we see some hope for the growth of the market in out years as several factors begin to kick in. As new eyeballs are sought by broadcasters and web-casters including, but not limited to, mobile devices (e. g. IPTV) and the digital build-out demands greater system support and deploys a wider range of services, we expect that broadcasters (and other ‘casters’) will seek more automation help for more channels. Languages, interactivity and the triple-play deployments of governmental PTTs and telephone companies have built the hope for a coming spike and revival in sales demand. Despite the fact that the IPTV market is so dominated by the IT or computer world it is nonetheless the specter of TV program delivery (such as films, news and sports, particularly) that are expected drive the IPTV space. And, thereby, build demand for more automation capacity. Despite the arrival a few years ago of PTT and telephone company entities as TV signal providers, we do not view them as ‘the cavalry,’ riding in to save the market for automation. For one thing, there aren’t very many of them and that isn’t going to change dramatically any time soon.

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