‘Workflow’ will be a much heard word in the radio industry during 2010 if the discussion topics at this year’s IBC Conference in Amsterdam were any indicator. The conference was full of tools to help radio and tv stations improve their productivity by improving workflow, reports Steve Ahern.

There is much double and triple handling in radio, even more in tv, and this year at IBC many companies displayed software aimed to rationalise those workflows and decrease double handling.

How efficient is your station in its workflows?

How many times is audio manually dubbed or transferred in and out of various systems?

How many steps does it take to get a script from the client to the transmitter?

These are the questions efficient stations are asking as they strive to squeeze the every dollar of profit out of their investment during these times of global financial crisis.

This is not just happening in production. The ‘produce once, publish many times’ principle has been applied to new versions of well known software products, such as Netia, to enable multiple simultaneous outputs to feed the transmitter, the internet and mobile phones automatically.

In television, where production and transmission processes are even more complex than radio, the amount of software available to streamline ‘content management’ is huge. In these days of multi-platform radio, the same thinking will be needed to make the radio industry as efficient as it can be.

Considering that most broadcast companies have huge archives of material, efficient systems to store and retrieve past program content are also becoming more essential. Various playout and production systems, such as Dalet, have improved and streamlined their ability to directly access archived content across wide area networks in their latest audio and video products. Dalet and Netia both cited examples of converged media companies (similar to Fairfax Media in Australia) using their one product to integrate content across their newspaper, tv and radio divisions.

The good news is, no one I spoke to said anything about people losing jobs. Most staffing levels in broadcasting were ‘downsized,’ ‘rightsized,’ or ‘made more efficient’ (whichever euphemism you prefer to use) long ago, and staff have been coping with high workloads and not enough tools to help them for many years now.

Workflow analysis, and the software tools that support it, are meant to improve that situation for staff.

In fact, one speaker believes the best ideas about workflow come not from management or engineering, but from front line sales, production and on air staff who are asking, ‘How can we do this better?’

While asking questions about better ways of doing things is not new, the flexible digital technology available these days now makes solutions much easier to achieve than in the past.

Even if a station is not in the market for new software, it would be worth applying the principles of workflow analysis to see if more efficiencies can be achieved in your station.

And if you do want new software, there’s plenty on offer.

“Radical new models for delivering new content,” were promised by many of the tools offered, and the mantra “create once, publish everywhere,” was chanted in more than one conference session.

The picture below shows French company Netia’s new audio output matrix device, set up to format and send audio and associated metadata to the internet, the transmitter and mobile phone screens all at the same time. The interactive diagram controls the path of the outputs and is easily changable as required.

An IBC home-grown Dutch product, called Amber Alert, developed by NetPresenter, won an award for innovation by finding a solution for multi-platform emergency warnings during child abductions. NetPersenter’s Amber Alert can format and transmit photos and alert messages to broadcast media, mobile phones, electronic information signs, Twitter, Facebook, websites and many other outlets simultaneously.

The product has successfully been used by the Dutch police and has saved several abducted children. The implications for radio stations, and for emergency services during disasters, are significant.

A new radioinfo advertiser, Radio Workflow is an Aussie company which has taken up the principles of efficient workflow analysis and developed a product for the Australian radio market. They are one of many companies developing new products to help your station work at maximum efficiency, using the ‘workflow’ thinking which was so priminent at this year’s IBC Conference.