Since its launch in 1993, CN2 has delivered a key “value-add” for Comporium customers, CN2’s parent company. The return of the investment in producing CN2’s local news coverage has been seen mostly in the larger context of Comporium’s public service and branding with direct revenue streams not meeting their potential. While ads and paid programming do run, there has been no means to manage placement of such paid content or to analyse sales.

“Our decision to implement BroadView marks a new era for CN2,” said CN2’s David Bain, Technical Operations/Production Manager. “We have always prided ourselves on the excellence of our news production, but quality content is just the starting point in today’s competitive media marketplace. With BroadView, we are now able to serve our advertisers better by helping deliver optimum placement in our schedule.”

Bain added that the new technical management infrastructure, working in tandem with a newly installed Crispin automation system, affords a fundamental workflow advance over the legacy methods that required significant manual intervention.

BroadView’s solution transforms CN2’s operations with both immediate and long-term gains anticipated. The innovative IT infrastructure combines programming, traffic and sales data on a unified database creating a foundation for future development as well as possible integration with Comporium’s systems.

“This ground-up installation should prove to be nothing less than a revelation for CN2,” said Michael Atkin, BroadView Founding Partner and President. “We expect to see across-the-board changes with significant bottom-line results.”

About CN2: Since its inauguration in 1992, CN2 has become more than just a leading source for local news – it has become an integral part of the community it serves. As a result of concentrated efforts to continuously promote the station and its personalities in a positive light, CN2′s popularity within the community is at its highest level yet. CN2, located in Rock Hill, SC, is the only local televised news source for York, Lancaster and Chester Counties, and continues to increase the value of services provided by Comporium Cable TV to subscribers through quality, locally originated programming. In the future CN2 will continue to focus on providing quality local news while pursuing its commitment to seek and provide new and unique local programming for its viewers. CN2 is an affiliate of Comporium, the nation’s 14th largest telecommunications provider and the 31st largest cable TV operator. For more information, please visit www.CN2.com.

Every now and then it seems I have to go ahead and spread the news  of yet another addition to our BroadView Software Family.  Welcome to  The Country Network, coming to a local digital channel near you.

The Country Network, a fast-growing music broadcast, cable, and new media network founded in 2009, has implemented BroadView’s integrated traffic, programming and sales modules to upgrade its technical infrastructure.

Since its creation, the Country Network’s founder Warren Hansen has understood the importance of bringing the proper broadcast management tools to bear to realize his unique vision for his network. With BroadView, the network is able to manage the 40+ affiliates, live web and moble streams, and multiple IPTV providers (including Roku) more effectively while providing a firm foundation for future growth.

“We’ve come to BroadView after an exhaustive experience with the current technology,” said Hansen. “We take an innovative approach to classic broadcast issues and BroadView gives us the flexibility plus the ease-of-use to build the business how we envision it and not how the technical infrastructure dictates.”

Hansen noted that this “exhaustive experience” goes beyond researching the marketplace and includes previous installations of OSI as well as other traffic systems. In practice, these proved unsuitable for implementing the Country Network’s business strategy.

BroadView’s solution for the Country Network puts programming, traffic and sales on the same information infrastructure while seamlessly interfacing with existing systems. This unified architecture is the hallmark of BroadView’s highly customizable modular approach. Clients enjoy the power of a custom-designed system with the economy of an off-the-shelf package. Also, customers receive updates to the latest revisions to the product. As new features and modules become available, they are able to quickly implement the latest capabilities as needed.

“The Country Network takes an innovative approach and their success is proving that such innovation is the key to opportunity,” said Michael Atkin, BroadView Founding Partner and President. “We are in the business of providing highly configurable, modular systems that meet the vast variety of needs in today’s fast-changing media marketplace. With BroadView, the clients’ needs define the technology – not vice-versa.”

About The Country Network
The Country Network (“TCN”) is an innovative music video network dedicated to providing today’s country music enthusiasts more choices in televised and digital programming. TCN is the only broadcast television network dedicated exclusively to airing country music videos. The Country Network with “all Country Music Videos, all the time” offers broadcasters a turn-key solution to utilizing their digital channel capacity, while attracting the largest music audience. The Country Network: It’s Your Country!
www.tcncountry.com

By now most everyone knows what Cloud Computing is, but not everyone is sure they want to be in the clouds.  The process has been around much longer than the new name.  It basically is a server, with all your computer applications, that you access remotely.  When I do my banking, that cloud is in West Point, Georgia.  When playing around with any of my blogs, that cloud is in Arizona and I suspect that even St. Cloud, MN has a few clouds there too.

In one of Michael’s examples, several television stations could access a common production library, complete with stock or real time video, for fast news room editing with an almost unlimited library video or special effects. Now the cost savings for a group of television stations using a system like this makes sense. Not big equipment purchases for each location, just internet access and a web browser.

What I didn’t know was that Amazon Web Services can provide a cloud at reasonable charges.  Here’s the example, you buy a server for your station and unless it’s the automation, it’s probably getting real use only 8 hours per day.  Do you feel cheated that it’s sitting doing nothing the rest of the time?  Well, with the Amazon model, you pay for what you use. And that’s basically time on line and size of your data.  You need more space, it just grows automatically with you, less, and then it gets smaller.

You may however remember the news from several months ago about their server farm going down.  However, due to redundancy in many locations, Amazon customers didn’t really know about it other than what they read or heard in the news media.  They guarantee a reliability of 99.99999% and that’s a lot of 9’s.

So, the cloud can be a money saver based on your operation, or reduce some of the work load of your already overburdened IT Staff. But for many, the decision is to keep that cloud inside your operation where you have control of everything.  So for now, the forecast, Continued Partly Cloudy!

There are several products designed to get you the maximum rates based on inventory demands.  And maybe that sentence is part of the problem.  You don’t need maximum rates everywhere; you need a rate to get you to budget.

At the Texas Association of Broadcasting convention this past week, Mike Mahone of Revenue Development Resources conducted a session called “Pricing to Win: Strategic Plan for Rate Management”  Before anyone buys software to work the rates, they really need to buy in on and understand the concept of pricing and be able to have your advertisers understand it as well.

In Australia, where our program was originally developed, all of radio understands the concept and the majority of stations sell that way.  Today I can name a handful of stations in the US that use one of the many products out there and get it, consistently “Nailing” their Budgets month after month.

Now much to the dismay of software vendors with extra priced rate management tools, Mike and his team have developed an Excel Spreadsheet that works all the magic formulas to get your rates right, to meet budgets. He offered it free to those of us in the meeting. You do need specific information from Traffic on inventory, but then the sheet does the heavy work.  From my point of view, I’d rather just give him a solid easy export from Traffic, after all the data is in there, right?

Mike points out that the biggest objection to this type of rate management is from within your own staff.   Understanding the math is just one step in getting the team on board to new ideas.  I liked the fact that even the lower priced ROS spots would get even distribution throughout the day parts and not all shoved to after 7PM for example.   Now Mike has been in the business long enough to know what he’s talking about, as a
Former Executive Vice President of the RAB. And he is practicing what he preaches, as he’s also the Market Manager for a three station cluster in Corpus Cristi with some pretty big name competition.  You can find more about him and the company at http://RDRToday.com.

Harris brings over twenty years experience working with broadcast technology and began her career as a traffic professional. Over the years, she has seen systems evolve from mainframes and green screens to today’s desktop technology. She comes to BroadView after many years’ service in senior positions at VCI Solutions (now WideOrbit).

“We’re bringing a new value equation for the industry, so Susan Harris’ experience introducing and implementing technology for broadcasters is invaluable,” said Michael Atkin, BroadView Founding Partner and President. “Her cache is credibility – grounded in a thorough understanding of today’s broadcast technology marketplace.”

Harris says that the opportunity to introduce this new approach to broadcast management systems is the fulfillment of a vision she has shared for some time.

“The arrival of BroadView’s OneSolution marks a major advance,” said Harris. “It’s easy to appreciate what this offers in theory, but what is even more impressive is how they’ve made this a practical reality.”

Harris added that implementing the new end-to-end system is greatly eased by BroadView’s “trifecta” approach.

“The ‘trifecta’ is highly configurable software, excellent training plus full, electronic conversion of the client’s historical data. This greatly simplifies the transition to the new system so that the bottom-line advantages can be had faster and easier than ever,” she said.

One of the final sessions and maybe one with the most attendance was Stephen Warley discussion on “Unlocking the True Value of Social Media”.  Stephen said those words that many Sales Managers in the room probably didn’t like to hear.  “Forget Cold Calling”, he said.  He echoed the words of another Sales Trainer I’ve followed lately, Frank J Rumbauskas, Jr., with similar thoughts.  Stephen said you should work to develop relationships with prospective clients using Social Media.  Essentially become the expert that others come to for help and buy what you’re selling.

Also emphasized was the need to use social tools to further educate you.  Monitor marketing trends and gather sales ideas.  His favorite social media tool appears to be Twitter.  And while he recommends Facebook for that business account, he’s thinking of quitting his personal account.  As a matter of fact, I stopped some Facebook habits I had after hearing his talk.  I guess you really don’t care that I’ve gone to the pub again today at five, since you’d expect me to do that anyway.

• Quick Facts from Stephens’s discussion:
• Top Five States on Facebook, 1 – California, 2 – Texas, 3 – New York, 4 – Florida and 5 – Illinois
• Record for Tweets per Second recorded during Super Bowl and it was 4,064 Tweets.
• Top Tweeting Events: , New Year’s Eve (In Japan), Obama’s Speech on Osama Bin Laden and the 2011 Super Bowl.

Small Businesses that post on Social Media more, get more noticed.  That makes sense, but the numbers were interesting.   Post 8 times or more a week and the average number of comments back is just over ten, but post less than once a week and less than one comment per day. The lesson is be consistent and post once or twice a day.

The final few minutes were discussions on promotions that can be done from each of the Social Media Sites. There are too many to name here, but freely available at his website, LocalBroadcastSales.com.  I would say you should pass that web address along to anyone in the Sales Department.  You’ll find lots of great ideas and forum discussions to spark that next promotion at your station.

To be fair, I went to the ultimate source of all things traffic, the TDGA for their definition.  Here’s what they said: The broadcasting term used to describe the function of scheduling announcements, programs and other information to create a Station Log or daily schedule. Traffic has been expanded to include all facets of tracking Inventory, Reports, and Continuity and frequently includes billing, co-op and other functions involving both Broadcast and NTR revenue functions.