The Phoenix station devised a way to automate its crosspromotion of multicast DTV channels.For 10 seconds in each station break, viewers see KAET’s trichannel lineup, with moving color highlights synched with the announcement: “Coming up on Eight HD, Eight Create and Eight World.”
What’s ahead on 8.2 and 8.3: It’s worth telling viewers now
After existing for years in obscurity — marooned somewhere in the future — digital multicast channels are becoming part of public TV’s real life.
Though the audiences are tiny, even by public TV’s standards, some have grown enough to be detectable by Nielsen.
In Phoenix, KAET’s 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 what’s 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 can’t 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 signal’s 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.
“We’re delivering three channels into the market, not just one,” says General Manager Kelly McCullough. “If we’re not measuring the aggregate audience across all the channels, we’re 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 he’ll 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 there’s 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 ProTrack’s ODBC (Open Data Base Connectivity), says Adam Draper, the station’s 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 wasn’t a big deal,” recalls Draper.
IT analyst Nic Desjardins agrees: “I think we got it on the first try.”
Web page posted March 2, 2010
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