All Aboard the Gravy Train

Getting vendors to see the value of participating in building the reference architecture was not hard, says Rantanen, especially since WGBH was already a customer of many of these vendors.

Artesia, which was already one of Sun’s partners in 2000, got involved when the public broadcaster invited the DAM vendor to its office late in 2000 to discuss its plans. Artesia saw that WGBH had put considerable thought into the system and the workflows and that, like Sun, Artesia had much to learn from WGBH about broadcasters’ needs for DAM. As a result, Artesia offered WGBH generous discounts on its products.

Grass Valley, Telestream and Virage were also eager to participate because they saw WGBH as a potential avenue for getting products installed at other PBS stations. But to be part of this reference architecture, vendors had to commit to ensuring that all current and future products and versions of products would interoperate with the other technologies in the architecture, plus they also had to donate products to the iForce Center and occasionally send technical staff there to test and tweak the products.

For companies whose products were open and integrated easily with other technologies, this wasn’t an issue. But many broadcasting technologies don’t interoperate well, whether deliberately or not, says Ken Devine, CTO of New York’s WNET. Getting the vendors of those products to devote development staff and products to the iForce Center for testing and integration has proven more challenging. Production system maker Avid Technology, for instance, has yet to devote hardware, software or developers to the effort, forcing WGBH to integrate Avid products on its own through stopgaps such as file wrappers and transcoders that convert from Avid’s proprietary file formats to standard ones.

According to Avid, the fact that WGBH was able to integrate its products into the reference architecture on its own is evidence that Avid’s products are easy to integrate. But Rantanen and MacCarn would prefer that companies adopting the reference architecture and Avid products need not go through the extra steps currently required to make Avid a part of the system.

In response, Rantanen says she and MacCarn have been trying to "wrestle Avid to the ground." They meet with Avid CEO David Krall every six months or so in a practice that WNET’s Devine (who also attends the meetings but who wouldn’t name vendors) refers to as "applying torque from the top." In the meetings, they try to convince the company that it will sell more products if it interoperates. They cite conversations they’ve had with other Avid customers in which those customers have said they wished Avid supported more open formats. And they mention the smaller vendors trying to make it in Avid’s space that would fall over themselves to be cited as fully integrated in the reference architecture.