David Bialik and Ray Archie
An audience of more than 35 members and guests attended the New York Section's first meeting in the
Joseph Urban Theater, located in the Hearst Corporation Tower. Another first was the use of Skype video and audio technology to enable panelist Andy Butler to participate in the meeting while speaking from his
Arlington, VA office at PBS. Seen on the theater's large screen, he was able to easily interact with both Ray Archie and our audience members.
Streaming and the distribution of those streams is a service that operates on a large scale, and requires a large amount of capacity as a safeguard for failures. Ray Archie of CBS Interactive discussed how CBS formerly streamed into their broadcast center with Windows Media, and then sent that stream to Limelight Networks (a Content Distribution Network), which created too many points of failure. CBS has since streamlined their operations, and uses two CDNs (Akamai and StreamTheWorld) for their radio streams. They have a cross-connect to their west coast CDN, thus negating the vagaries of the Internet when the stream originates from that location. The advantage of StreamTheWorld is instant metrics, allowing for a CPM (cost per thousand) model for the advertisers supporting the content. The stream received by the users has passed through a Symetrix profanity delay, though this is not required by law.
Andy Butler explained that PBS has to generate seventeen different versions from any media they ingest
for streaming and distribution purposes. They host pbs.org, with over 719,000 web pages, on an OC12 connection in parallel with two different ISPs. The audio streams have "decent stereo", with issues in Microsoft's codecs needing to be overcome to have 5.1 audio. Andy also lamented that people think DTV "is only software", when it is not, which is why there are other obstacles to overcome in streaming and distribution of their content.
Both Andy and Ray prefer to operate their networks at 40% capacity, so that in the event of a router or CDN
failure the switchover to compensate for this does not overload a network. Ray recalled an incident where the Yahoo! and AOL Radio streams remained online, while CBS' had gone silent due to routers going offline, thus emphasizing that you need backup routers (or routes) in place for uptime. They also see Quality of Service (QoS) issues with WiMax and mobile reception that will need to be solved before streaming to fast-moving mobile devices (cars, trains) can be a good experience. Ray believes the current game-changer is a Samsung HDTV that is IP enabled, and can tie into CBS' content. He stated that one million of these HDTVs had been produced, but did not have any sales figures.
