Circa 1973, the Pink Floyd classic ‘Money’ seemed to assume a universal state of being cash rich, however in 2009 the current economic climate dictates the need for us to sing a different tune. As with all situations, there are numerous positives to be derived from the downturn as well and here are a few pointers to help get the ball rolling. Technology Selection These are converged times where the boundaries between broadcast, consumer technology and IT are increasingly blurred. High speed, low-latency internet and telecom networks are giving rise to attractive new paradigms for technology selection even in these troubled economic times. Consider live contribution links where a typical newscaster would do very well to deploy CCTV IP Cams from vendors like Sony, Panasonic etc that currently provide VGA resolutions and total remote control, in most cases eliminating the high recurring cost of deploying full ENG crews. If you have access to reliable 3G networks, then for newsgathering evaluate Web 2.0 options like kyte.com or its broadcast equivalent - Viz Reporter, working off 5Megapixel cellphones enabling you to contribute VGA resolution video or even go live to air from your cellphone. Look to deploy open source alternatives to commonly used software e.g replacing 50 MS Office licenses with Sun’s Open Office would save you upwards of $10k, try Gimp instead of Photoshop, Blender3D for 3DsMax, Audacity for simple apps like recording VO’s and basic audio editing. Look beyond the typical ‘Rolls Royce class of broadcast equipment’ like Avid, Quantel, VizRT, Thomson etc and evaluate lower cost alternatives that extensively use off-the-shelf h/w & s/w like VSN, Playbox, Editshare, Wasp3D etc that help you reduce capex as well as annual maintenance opex. At NDTV Worldwide tech (www.ndtvworldwide.com), we now deploy ‘Yoda’ which is a full multi-cam live production system in a laptop that allows us to switch and produce 3 cam setups using just a laptop saving us at least $20,000 in capex for a similar setup and about $3000 per shoot in opex. In all fairness you get what you pay for, however even with reduced functionality you’d be surprised the alternative might just deliver exactly what you need at a fraction of the cost. Get in touch with your ‘consumer side’- at the risk of offending the purists, for trade shows do consider CES and maybe give NAB/IBC a skip, simply because today consumer tech is really really hot, for e.g compared to a typical news format like DV25 the consumer tapeless Canon HF11 working at 24Mbs does a really decent job of AVCHD at a fraction of the cost. One of the cheapest ‘encoders’ you could find has to be the Slingbox for around $250 which we at NDTV Worlwide (www.ndtvworldwide.com) use extensively for monitoring our clients news channels over public internet – it simply encodes baseband HD and you watch the stream over the web wherever you are in the world! For your contribution links consider switching to MPEG-4 wherever possible, as a general rule of thumb you would pay 15-20% less for bandwidth if you did so. Efficiencies/Waste reduction Good times tend to mask inefficiencies in the system and a recession is a great time to revisit your broadcast chain, map out your process end to end, identify non-productive activities and make things faster, leaner and more efficient. Classic examples of waste are de-centralized facility management, multiple copies of media being made, poor media management leading to demands for more storage, unnecessary media ingest, re-entry of metadata, multiple approval steps etc. Performance metrics like average time taken per edit, raw footage per min of on-air time, percentage of new stories that get dropped from a running order, percentage of agency feeds actually used on-air etc are good indicators of how efficient a newsroom is or the level of waste there is in the system. As part of the consultancy services we offer to our clients (http://www.ndtvworldwide.com/Services_Consulting.aspx) we measure and use these metrics with LEAN and 6 Sigma techniques to help broadcasters achieve cost savings. Other typical examples of trimming could be strategic outsourcing, reducing the number of news bureaus, OB Vans, bandwidth of telco links between multiple sites, implementing digital archives to reduce tape library staffing and superfluous workflows, VOIP for phone calls etc. For managers The captain of a ship caught in a storm would naturally want his best hands on deck, so people management is crucial here. The opportunity here is twofold – ·        With a lot of firms retrenching employees you can actually hire some great talent for a song and secondly, ·        To create a bunch of top performers because by now you’re probably under pressure to cut staff levels thus giving you a chance to easily identify and ease out the non-performers A fresh, tightly knit and competent team will smoothen the ride and possibly even make a success story out of it. As a manager ensure that your broadcast tech spend should ideally be divided into essential and desirable, for e.g careful analysis could reveal that the playout server purchase you initially projected as an essential spend could, with a few spares or stepped up preventive maintenance or a new codec pack, be converted into a desirable purchase, deferred or even cancelled, saving thousands of dollars. Consider carefully the financial impact of adding redundancy to a system. Its nice to want a 100% redundant system with no SPOF, however my own experience (http://www.ndtvworldwide.com/ManagementTeam.aspx) with fully redundant setups tells me that in a lot of cases the extra cost and complexity are probably just not worth it no matter what the sales guy tells you – fall back on experience, exercise your judgement carefully and convert this into a pure business decision – you’d be surprised at some of the answers you get. For employees Your primary objective is to make yourself recession-proof. Blasphemous though it may sound, arm yourself with a very clear and basic understanding of finance, economics and trends within your industry – it will help you think and act strategically besides helping add something to the ‘nuts and bolts guy’ tag we technology guys sometimes carry. Ensure that you add value to your organisation and ask yourself if you’re ‘just doing what I’m told’ – people that think out of the box, provide solutions and thought leadership will always be considered valuable. It is critical to educate yourself further, increase the depth or the breadth of your knowledge and skills but do it now. Should the hammer fall, the least skilled would be the first to go. For e.g a programmer working on VizRT graphics at a broadcaster would be quite valuable if he also gained knowledge of baseband systems like the vision mixer, digital glue etc, the ‘video guy’ would greatly benefit by a Linux/Cisco or SQL certification, similarly the creative graphic artist should learn some programming. Besides allowing management to leverage each individual’s skills better, which in turn means you add more value, it also forces you to generate an additional career path upwards. Tough environments tend to naturally induce resourcefulness and ingenuity amongst the inhabitants, so bring out this natural resilience within your people. Economic conditions are cyclical in nature and it’s but a matter of time before this downturn will give way to a boom, however till such time as we’re in it, we have to take the best stride to minimize its impact.