The Zacapades

I have to be honest… I was quite disappointed with this session. Topically, I was very interested. I know there is loose discussion with how this would be done at WOUB, so I definitely wanted to see what an expert panel at PBS had to say. Turns out, very little. Everything that was presented was, for the most part, pretty obvious. “If you don’t want to have people there, you need some kind of alert system to tell you if something goes wrong.” Well, yeah. “You need a way to FTP into your system to fix something if it goes well.” You don’t say. “Somebody needs to be on call to check from home if an alarm goes off.” Uh huh. There were also many comments from a managerial standpoint on how “you’ve purchased this automation software, why pay more to have people monitor it?"

I’m an advocate of automation, to be sure, but it’s very hard to COMPLETELY remove the human element. Sure, there may be shifts where operator involvement is at a minimum. But what of those nights where the unexpected happens? Storms knock transmitters off the air, or a program happens to stop abruptly halfway through, or a satellite goes dark for no apparent reason? In television, seconds can seem like an eternity. But 90% of the time, WOUB operations is pretty quick to provide a solution. I couldn’t imagine a situation where, because of errors in notification systems, or delays in transportation and dispatch of personnel, kept our station off the air for… hours? The whole night? Sure, you can save some money by cutting a shift out, but is that worth equal to general reliability of service?

I sat through the session, expecting them to go into real nuts-and-bolts on how to accomplish this, but there was really nothing. Perhaps we at WOUB just have such a really good grasp at this that the information intended to be thought-provoking just came off as redundant.