On June 17, 2020, the New York chapter of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) had a section meeting titled: “Covid NYC: Live TV Production Workflow.” Live TV includes both local and national news programs and talk shows, including Live with Kelly and Ryan on Disney ABC Home Entertainment and A Late Show with Steven Colbert on Viacom CBS. This latter show has been temporarily renamed “A Late Show with Stephen at Home.”
(Credit: SMPTE NY, with affiliations added by M. Brennesholtz)
There were representatives on the panel from all four major networks, including Fox, ABC, NBC and CBS. In addition, B&H Photo had a representative on the panel for two reasons. First, the company is a major supplier of equipment to the New York broadcast community and had an important role in supplying equipment for the switch from in-studio live production to social-distanced live production. Second, they are the sustaining sponsor of the New York Chapter and in-person chapter meetings have occasionally used B&H spaces.
One thing about live network TV is the phrase “the show must go on” was practically written on the stone tablets handed down at Mount Sinai. Typically, in-studio production involves backup and duplication of everything. When it was obvious to the networks that Covid-19 made in-studio production impossible, each network and each station or subsidiary of each network scrambled to find a social distancing solution.
Jobs done by people working from home vs. in the production facility at CNBC. (Credit: CNBC)
Typically, this involved most or all of the production staff working from home. Steve Fastook, SVP, Production and Operations, CNBC, showed the figure above and said it was already out-of-date because CNBC had more like 90% of its people working from home at the time of the SMPTE meeting, not 85% as shown. Studio Ops is the largest group coming into the facilities, although even some of them manage to work from home.
Timeline of the CNBC reaction to the Coronavirus. (Credit: CNBC)
Fastook also showed a timeline of the reaction of CNBC to the coronavirus. They first recognized it as a problem that required drastic action on February 28th. By March 4th, they had selected an at-home camera platform to allow reporters to work from home and, by the 12th, they had the first reporter actually working on-air from home. On March 17th, they had the first confirmed case of Covid-19 at CNBC. This threw a monkey wrench in the works because that person was one of a team of 14 working on a “Break Glass” emergency broadcast room. All 14 were sent home into quarantine immediately.
Also on the 17th, CNBC bought the entire stock of iPads at B&H. By the 20th, the emergency back-up room was ready in Englewood Cliffs, away from the normal CNBC studios, and ready for use if needed to keep CNBC on the air. By the 23rd, all on-air CNBC talent (about 70 people worldwide) had the equipment needed to file their reports from home.
CNBC is not just a continuous news feed of business and economic information from around the world, it also runs special events such as investor conferences. By April 2nd, they had organized and run their first virtual special event. Fanstook said that having the events online has not, in fact, cut into the revenue of the events. For the in-person events, CNBC would typically sell about 200 tickets for about $200 each. For the virtual versions of the events, they sell more like 1000 tickets at $50 apiece.
Now that virtually all aspects of CNBC are being operated from home, the effort at the company is hardening and improving all the off-site facilities. This includes providing redundant internet access and power for all work-from-home sites. In areas where it is allowed, the redundant power is a generator but in other places, such as apartments, the back-up power is battery-based and designed to provide at least three hours of power.
Home studios for on-air talent at NBC. (Credit: NBC News)
Stacy Brady, EVP, News Field and Production Operations, NBC News, discussed the NBC preparations for work-from-home rather than at the NBC studios at 30 Rock, the NBC building at Rockefeller Center in New York. This involved providing home-studios for 65 on-air people, including 23 anchors and 42 reporters. Not surprisingly, the anchors got more complex studio set-ups, including robotic cameras and teleprompters controlled remotely by someone else working from home at a different location.
Besides home studios, NBC set up 150 home edit and production suites, 100 media managers, archivists, loggers and capture managers, 50 support engineers, 29 MTC stations to control the video traffic into and out of the storage hardware at 30 Rock and 50 at-home screening rooms for editors and producers. She added that at home producer monitoring is needed and currently NBC has the capacity of about 80 multi-viewer channels, expected to increase to 200+ soon. In addition, there are about 3500 people that need to be able to screen production and archive content remotely and work with producers and editors as needed.
Field Production at NBC. (Credit: NBC News)
Of course, a news organization, whether local, national or global, cannot work from home at all times – that’s not where the news is. Brady also discussed the coronavirus field protocols designed to keep both NBC reporters and the people they are interviewing safe from each other.
Remote Talk Show Production at CBS. (Credit: CBS)
Merrick Ackermans, Director RF and Transmissions Engineering, ViacomCBS, and based in Atlanta, discussed the production of a live talk show at home, A Late Show with Stephen at Home. While this may not be live news, it is a good money maker for CBS and could not be allowed to go off the air due to a minor thing like a pandemic. This show is normally produced at the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York before a live audience, a practice that was ended abruptly by the pandemic.
The block diagram above shows the hardware used to produce the show. Note all the key elements are connected to each other via SDI video interfaces. SDI is relatively short range wired real-time video interface and all elements connected via SDI must be in the same building, which in this case is the Ed Sullivan theater. Note that SDI is the video interface and there is a parallel set of connections, not shown, for control. These control interfaces on modern video hardware are almost all via IP.
If the show director and producers are in the same building as the video hardware, fine, but if they aren’t, the IP control signals for the hardware can come over the Internet. All of the dozens of people needed to produce the show have been based remotely (i.e. at home) since March 13th, the first time the show was produced remotely. At present, when the show is going out live, there are only two people in the Ed Sullivan theater, one in the basement and one on the seventh floor. Even these days, this is considered a safe social distance.
Steven Colbert, the host of the late show, works alone from a studio in his home – no camera man, no lighting people, no makeup person. There are two fixed cameras in his home studio, both running continuously and being fed to the hardware at the Ed Sullivan Theater. The first is aimed straight at Colbert and he more or less fills the screen when he is talking alone. The second is off-center and at an angle. This produces an image where Colbert fills the right-hand side of the screen but not the left. This empty space allows his remote guest, who talks to Colbert via Zoom, to be inserted picture-in-picture by the remote producers.
This ability to control complex equipment remotely is what makes the production of live TV possible, even while social distancing. The old days of needing to sit in front of the piece of equipment and look at the built-in displays, turn the analog knobs and push buttons built into the equipment are long gone. In the extreme, some companies have gone to cloud production of live video, using services like Amazon Web Services (AWS). In a situation like this, remote control is even easier: you can control a piece of equipment in Seattle as easily from your home in New Jersey as from your studio in New York. – Matthew Brennesholtz
