Signiant, the market leader in intelligent file movement software for media and entertainment, today announced that Hearst Television has selected itsManagers+Agentsâ„¢ technology platform as the file transfer backbone for a new, ultra-efficient TV advertising spot delivery system.  Already deployed at three of Hearst’s 29 U.S. stations for testing, the innovative solution paves the way for same-day ad delivery by centralizing, automating and accelerating the digital ingest, processing, management and distribution of local and national TV spots –demonstrating the promise of software-oriented architectures for streamlined ad delivery and faster time to revenue.

Hearst has long been recognized as a leader in national advertising spot management and distribution across its station group, yet the multiplicity of local TV ad spot sources has dictated widely varied local station workflows for receiving ads, verifying their broadcast quality, transcoding, developing metadata, storing and archiving them.  The level of human oversight frequently required to handle the different delivery methods and file formats of local spots can also force ad closing deadlines that limit revenue potential.

Hearst’s new system is a Signiant-based private cloud solution that creates a centralized ingest, processing and distribution hub for all of its stations – saving local station resources, tape and shipping costs, and offering a new way to enable more late selling of commercial time.  Using the system, local commercials to be aired on a particular station are delivered directly to the central hub, instead of the local station. Once received, the spots are routed via Signiant to Hearst’s Telestream transcoding platform, which is tightly integrated with their traffic system.  During this process, metadata for each ad is generated, logged and stored. Spots are then electronically delivered via Signiant to the appropriate local station for playout.

“For years broadcasters have focused on accelerated file-based content delivery primarily for programming, but local TV spot workflows are ripe for file-based efficiency,” said Joe Addalia, Director of Technology Projects at Hearst Television. “In today’s 24×7 broadcast environment, we can gain a tremendous advantage by allowing advertisers to get their TV commercials on air anywhere in the Hearst network faster than ever.  With the new system we created with the help of Signiant, we’re putting technology to work so the entire process for our advertisers and internal staff can move more smoothly.”

Unlike custom-scripted FTP jobs that cannot easily scale, Signiant Managers+Agents provides a powerful solution for broadcast engineering, IT and media infrastructure professionals seeking more sophisticated automation, security and centralized control of their media delivery processes. The software features advanced resource management tools that allow administrators to prioritize the delivery of assets between sites, and control bandwidth usage to specific locations or servers based on content delivery windows to ensure that systems or IT networks are not overloaded.  Use of Signiant’s Automation Engine facilitates the automated processing of content. Templates can be as simple as moving a file from one location to another, or as sophisticated as directing a package for transcoding and watermarking before publishing.