Going With the Flow

摘要

IT HAS BECOME one of the great challenges in TV industry tech-how best to streamline work flows and handle more channels and content with shrinking staffs. That challenge is providing strong impetus to shift to a variety of technologies designed to make automation systems more widely interoperable with other aspects of the broadcast infrastructure, such as traffic and billing. One example of the trend: some recent deployments using the BXF (broadcast exchange format) standard for integrating various automation, trafficking, production and other systems so that content can flow more easily through the TV station with less manual intervention. The BXF standard, first adopted in 2009, has been talked about for some time. But only a few commercial stations have widely used it to integrate products from different vendors, in part because BXF implementations can require labor-intensive customization. The advantages of using a standard to integrate systems are, however, beginning to outweigh some of the drawbacks, and more stations are embracing the move.