As the WICT newsletter team sat around a cramped lunch table discussing ideas for the next issue and assigning articles, there were a few blank faces at the mention of digital media. I think we all had a loose idea of what it meant – GMail on your BlackBerry, episodes of Lost on your iPhone – but none of us leapt at the opportunity to write about it.

Somehow it wound up on my plate.

What does that mean?

Working in the technology arena at Turner Broadcasting, where my clients include Network Operations (the folks who beam your signal into space) and Studios (responsible for original productions).

As suited as anyone to write about digital media, but the topic seemed big, daunting and little dry sounding. It needed a sexier name to catch me, and I needed it explained in terms I could understand by people who wouldn’t make me feel a fool for asking.

I reached out to three people: Jim Bernier; Director of Engineering for Network Operations, Ken Brady; Director of Technical Operations and Digital Media for Turner Studios, and Ellie Stokes; Implementation Manager in Enterprise Applications.

The simple answer is this: digital media involves ingesting and converting media from videotape to a pile of bits and bytes and then figuring out how to distribute that pile electronically. This removes the need for couriers to run tapes across town for review or air, reduces FedEx bills that are several inches thick each month, and most importantly (to me) reduces the carbon footprint associated with each of those.

If you want more information than just what you'd need to answer a trivia question in a bar, keep reading.

From the Network Operations side of the house, Jim explains how his group has been impacted and responds to demands of the multi-media swing: “The desire is to have any of our media in its highest resolution form, then move that media in that form into systems. From there, flip it, and turn it into whatever the appropriate resolution is – for whatever device it intends to be delivered to.” He uses television vs. cell phones as an example and says “the goal is to have content available to anyone, anywhere at anytime.”

From the Studios side, Ken explains how his group addresses the issue and brings it full circle: “The Digital Media Group (DMG) was put in place a couple of years ago as a reaction to the fact that clients were selling and repurposing for non-traditional outlets: handheld, gaming, DVD. The group has since grown with the amount of sales of Turner content to those outlets. So as TBS gets the right to sell their content to iTunes, or Bittorrent, Sales makes the sales, then they come to us and say “okay guys, we sold it, go make it happen. We need every season of Space Ghost on Amazon.”

They get technical contact information, contact the distributor, get specifications on needs and finally, they test.” At that point the client gives them all the tape based material, they take it and turn it into what Ken calls a “Gold Master File”, which is 1:1, and a format they can reuse for outlets later. The Gold Master goes on storage, so if the next vendor comes along and wants something for say – Xbox – they don’t have to get the tape back again, or pull them.

“For us, then it’s simple to turn that into the new format. It’s about repurposing content, and flexibility. The process allows the networks to make sales more quickly and post to new vendors in a more expedient fashion.”

I can do the math. Speed + volume = profit.

Sounds simple enough, but we’ve all flipped to an HD channel by now and seen a distorted image. Or maybe we watch a DVD and set it to widescreen when we don’t have a widescreen TV. I asked Jim about this, and if I could blame him for making my pictures wonky.

He laughs and I take that as a "no" as he explains that “many times, the originating material isn’t ready. We still have to display and transport over, then “up convert”. The other thing is changing the aspect ratio – taking 4:3 images to 16:9.”

That sounds complicated and I think that in this day and age, there’s surely a software package that will do this for you. Nope. Ken's group also works with this challenge, and I learn from Ellie Stokes that the simple process is still time consuming and requires human interaction. In fact, it can take "up to six times as long as the original runtime of a program to convert."

That’s stunning, disheartening and yet, encouraging.

The jobs that would seem to disappear as a result of my previously mentioned reduction in couriers, FedEx delivery people in their cute purple and black outfits and the like, will really just be shifted. We’ll need more manpower in more technology driven roles.

What else this means for our industry

With all this good news and excitement, I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop and I ask Jim about how this relates to the Napster v. Metallica and the Big TV Execs v. TiVo a few short years ago.

I hit the nail on the head. “Real risk is not redundancy of data, but how you protect yourself against theft: illegal copies. You’re old enough to remember guys with camcorders in movie theatres.” I grunt. I am old enough to remember that. Bootlegged copies of Flashdance with some guy hacking up a lung off screen, or the lady who’s silhouette you see in the middle of the movie, walking out to use the loo or get more popcorn.

“People would buy it. It took effort, the quality wasn’t there, and you knew if you had bootleg. Digital is bit for bit copying, and it’s pristine as long as there’s no transcode. How do you allow transmission of digital signal for legitimate presentation purposes, while preventing its capture for unauthorized copy distribution?”

It’s as fine and as rhetorical a question as they make. It’s one people like Jim, Ken and Ellie are still trying to figure out, all the while bringing me the joy of watching clean copies of My Boys on my laptop from the coffee shop.

What about the women?

I’m writing this article for WICT, after all; and I’d be remiss not to prod Jim, Ken and Ellie about how balanced or imbalanced their organizations might be. Given the technical complexity of the process and the fact that I grew up with a stereotype that engineers were men, I’m curious for myself as well.

Ken is counting, “1…2…3…”

We’re on the phone having this conversation and I imagine him in his second floor office, faced away from his window, his flat screen TV and his ginormous monitors with his eyes closed behind his glasses.

In the end, he has about a 50/50 split of men and women on his team, attributable he says “to hiring the right person for the job.” He almost made me weepy with that.

In Jim’s group it’s not as equal a split, but he says his team has a number of women.

He explains that many recently have come from station level or other networks, but he’s not seeing women in actual engineering. “It’s always been an issue in broadcasting. I’ve always wondered why – there are several women in senior level positions – like the Senior Vice President at Warner Brothers, but she’s a rare individual. “

Always good for a history lesson, Jim says “many engineers came out of the military in WW2 or were mentored by the men who did…women were slow to go into engineering because they’d been taught math was their strong point.” Ah yes, how I remember.

His advice: tell someone if you have an interest in engineering! Too often you hear people say “I thought I might want to, but I didn’t say anything” which bothers him a bit since he’s the father of three young women.

If engineering isn’t for you, have no fear. Digital media is going to touch all of us in one way or another, and Ellie has sage wisdom to share: “Think about how the tape world applies to your role now, think about how it would change if it were digital - how it would impact your environment. Now go solve the challenge for your area.”