Because of this partnership, the public broadcaster has a DAM system that integrates with its editing, production, trafficking and broadcast systems, and that gives WGBH employees Web-based access to millions of content files. The DAM system enables WGBH to share its content internally and with other public TV stations and educational institutions, and to deliver its content via more distribution channels and in more customized ways to viewers and station members. At WGBH, the DAM system is capable of distributing data at a rate of 20MBps to 30MBps to individual PBS stations. IDC (a sister company to CIO’s publisher) did an extensive study of the implementation and predicts that WGBH may be able to improve production efficiency by as much as 40 percent.

This small organization that relies on public generosity and government funding to sustain itself convinced a group of vendors to share proprietary information and devote staff and equipment on its behalf to create this system by catering to vendors’ bottom lines, playing them off their competition, getting buy-in from the vendor CEOs and by leveraging its expertise in broadcasting and its reputation as one of the most highly respected TV stations in the United States. Those are tactics most companies can exploit when negotiating with vendors, especially when, like WGBH, they want to be an early adopter of a leading-edge technology that will give them a competitive advantage. But the effort wasn’t completely one-sided. WGBH had to make some dubious concessions too—trade-offs that may not have caused the TV station much pain, but ones that a public company would be hard-pressed to duplicate. In the end, WGBH got the DAM system it had been trying to build for years and, in the process, helped create an architecture that has already been adopted by New York public TV station WNET, Milwaukee Public Television, Comcast and Major League Baseball.

Quid Pro Back Scratch

When Dave MacCarn, WGBH’s chief technologist and asset management architect, began evaluating DAM technologies in the mid-1990s, he spoke with several vendors, including IBM, EMC and Silicon Graphics. They all offered solutions but with hefty price tags that the public broadcaster couldn’t afford. His colleague, WGBH Director of Information Technology and Asset Management Amy Rantanen, met with some Sun executives at a conference for broadcasters in 2000 and told them about the work WGBH had done speccing out a DAM system and about the challenges WGBH faced getting funding for such a system, and she asked Sun for help.