Next Generation Interconnection System
To trim costs, satellite rebuild puts on the speed
Within little more than a year, public TV plans to get a new interconnection system up and running — a political and technological high-wire act. Congress has yet to commit more than half of the budget and no broadcaster has yet assembled such a complex satellite video network using Internet file-transfer technology. [PBS disagreed with this statement.]
The Next Generation Interconnection System — the third satellite system in pubTV’s history — got a green light Aug. 9 [2005]. CPB, which is disbursing the special capital funds and also covers half of operating costs, signed the go-ahead contract with PBS, which will design, build and operate the system for public TV.
Under the conference table, some fingers and toes must be crossed.
Though pubcasters reduced the estimated NGIS pricetag from $177 million to $120 million this spring—in part, by hurrying the process—Congress has okayed only $49.5 million so far. (That includes $9.9 million in the fiscal 2004 federal budget and $39.6 million in this year’s.) There’s a chance of a $40 million installment in next year’s budget, but Senate leaders would have to prevail in fall negotiations with the House, which okayed zilch.
As for the risk of digital glitches, engineers say they’re inevitable in a complicated tangle of new software. “We don’t have the time or money to do it the way we recognize would be the right way to do it,” says Bruce Jacobs, technology chief at Twin Cities PTV and an active participant in NGIS planning.
Luis Guardia, CPB’s senior director of media technology, expects “no more surprises than ordinary in a new system.”
Oh, great.
When pubTV gets past the speed bumps, however, planners expect enormous gains in efficiency and functionality.
Except for the NewsHour and other timely fare, most national programming will go to stations long before airdate in an unending digital bitstream of file transfers. The data will be packed so efficiently PBS can move from using nine satellite transponders to five and eventually just three.
Included in the system’s cost are “edge servers” at about 180 pubTV licensees—hard-disc in-boxes on the edge of the satellite system. Some low-budget stations will be able to feed their transmitters directly from digital storage for the first time, PBS said. For a better-equipped station, the new edge server will become an entry point for one or more other video servers already handling their program schedules.
It will overturn inefficient daily routines at stations. “The very concept of net records will go away,” says Mike Clark, director of technology planning at Kentucky ETV. Technicians in Lexington tape 20 or 30 shows off the satellite every day—barcoding, storing and eventually recycling tapes so another PBS feed can be time-delayed.
Stations taking advantage of automation will be able to run four multicast schedules with fewer control-room technicians than they needed for one. PBS will save millions on satellite bandwidth by ending extra feeds for five or six time zones.
Fewer errors will end up on the TV screen. If a storm disrupts reception of a program from PBS, stations won’t have to ask for a refeed. An Internet-style error correction system automatically checks received files. If there are errors, it finds a clean copy of the show—they’re often sent multiple times in what’s called “forward error correction”—or the system asks a PBS computer to retransmit the spoiled portion of the file.
Thrift in speed
NGIS planners decided to shift to high gear this spring, according to Guardia and Ed Caleca, senior v.p. for technology at PBS. By switching the interconnection directly to efficient file-transfer technology next year when most of pubTV’s transponder leases expire, rather than phasing it in over several years, they aim to save millions in satellite bandwidth costs.
“If we get up and running very soon, we could save a lot of money very quickly,” says Guardia. He says the “very aggressive” timetable, combined with dropping equipment prices, will drop the cost to $120 million. Pubcasters took the good news to Capitol Hill this spring.
Stations also have a chance to save money if they reduce payroll for technicians, though managers typically talk—in public, anyway—about reassigning and even retraining staffers rather than laying them off.
The CPB-PBS contract concluded months of negotiations on housekeeping details to run a temporary Interconnection Replacement Office at PBS headed by longtime pubTV engineer Jerry Butler. The CPB Board met by telephone Aug. 9, authorizing new President Pat Harrison to make the pact with PBS.
Plans will be reviewed by technologists Aug. 30 and general managers in mid-September, Caleca says. He hopes to begin contracting for equipment early next year. Meanwhile, committees are wrestling with practical questions, says Jacobs. For instance: Who bleeps old files out of edge servers so they’re not jammed up like regular in-boxes in offices?
PubTV faces classic resource-allocation questions about how much a single station can demand from the satellite system, says Chuck McConnell of NETA. How, for example, can NGIS discourage a station from repeatedly demanding special feeds of old shows and running up costs for everyone?
No room for backhauls
NGIS is pubTV’s fifth interconnection system, if you count the original one — shipping videotapes around the country in the bellies of Greyhound buses and the like. When CPB was new it created the first electronic interconnection, leasing land lines from AT&T. PBS pioneered with the first satellite system for a TV network in 1978. The present system came out of the $150 million rebuild in 1991. It provided the dishes that stations will continue to use in NGIS.
For efficiency, all file transfers will emanate from PBS’s satellite center in Springfield, Va., now being rebuilt, but live broadcasts, including the BBC newscasts now uplinked by NETA from Columbia, S.C., can be fed by APT, NETA and other uplinks.
Though observers call the system a “hybrid” — and it does pay for stations’ land-based high-speed Internet connections—the wired links will be used mostly for messaging with PBS and other distributors and will lack the capacity to carry much video.
A fully funded NGIS will also give PBS a digital archive management system, speeding retrieval of programs from its vast archives, PBS said.
The system hasn’t been scaled down because of lagging appropriations, Caleca says, but it will not fulfill everyone’s wish list. There’s not enough money or capacity for extensive “backhauling” of video, he says. Producers at stations had dreamed of collaborating on productions and swapping footage over the net. They may need to buy that capacity themselves, though university-related stations may be able to use higher ed’s ultrafast Internet 2, says Butler. NGIS software will at least oversee such backhauls even if the data moves slowly over ordinary Internet hookups, says McConnell.
The system also lacks features that would let program distributors give access only to stations that pay for given programs — a feature public radio built into its forthcoming ContentDepot system. PubTV didn’t need the capability enough to accept the added technical complexity, says Jacobs.
PBS already has a backup uplink near Quantico, Va., for times when transmission is interrupted at he main Springfield uplink. Now foreseeing new risks more severe than a heavy storm, it plans to add a fully redundant uplink somewhere in mid-America, complete with duplicate program storage, Caleca says.
He says the present plan includes neither new security features — or new revenues — that may come if federal agencies adopt the pubTV system as a major emergency-alert network, as proposed by APTS.
Correction and clarifications
The print edition of this story originally misidentified the project as the New Generation Interconnection System. Make that "Next." PBS quarreled with other statements in the article, as reflected in these clarifications published in a later issue:
Our Aug. 29 [2005] article about public TV’s satellite system, now being assembled by PBS, failed to reflect PBS’s confidence in its plans, overseen since 2001 by the network’s Interconnection Replacement Office. Current has invited PBS to discuss the project in a commentary. [The commentary by Edward Caleca was published Nov. 21, 2005].
Contrary to our report that “no broadcaster has yet assembled such a complex satellite video network using Internet file-transfer technology,” PBS says, Tribune Media and Hearst-Argyle “have put together similar systems to distribute syndicated programming and all of the major commercial networks make at least some use of an IP-based file transfer system to distribute news stories.”
Web page posted Oct. 21, 2008
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