SOFTWARE-AS-A-SERVICE IS LOOKING GOOD IN

BROADCAST APPLICATIONS
Jim Martinolich
Chyron Corporation
Melville, New York

INTRODUCTION Before SaaS, all these issues were assumed to be the

The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) concept is
spreading throughout the IT and professional services
industry. But does it have a place in the hardware-
intensive world of broadcast television production?
This paper will describe how SaaS is being used to
successfully create broadcast graphics at many
facilities today and how it may herald the future of
many broadcast applications. This paper will describe
first hand the experiences of one station that has
successfully adopted SaaS into their news production
workflow.
WHAT IS SAAS?
Like in any industry these days, software plays a
crucial role in broadcasting. In a traditional
commercial software model, a customer purchases
the software from a vendor, incurring a capital
expense that they expect to amortize over a period of
time, and install it on their own IT infrastructure.
The customer is now responsible for maintaining the
hardware, ensuring the security of the application and
data, making and archiving backups, installing
upgrades from the vendor as they become available.
When problems arise, the customer needs to contact
the vendor and try to debug the problem remotely or
wait for service representative to visit. As the
customer’s requirements grow, new hardware and/or
software upgrades are required.
natural cost of ownership and a necessary trade off
for the benefits provided by the software. Software
as a Service (SaaS) refers to a revolutionary new
business model where the software application is
hosted by the vendor and provided as a service to the
customer via the Internet. In most SaaS applications a
web browser is used as a client so little or no setup or
installation is required.
SaaS applications are becoming more and more
common in every industry and in consumer
applications. The saas-showplace.com website, an
industry guide, lists 950 vendors of SaaS applications
in 25 industries and that list is growing. Industry
polls show a high degree of satisfaction with SaaS
products.
Common examples of web provided services would
be Internet search tools such as Google, social
networking sites such as Facebook, or consumer
media sites such as iTunes and YouTube. All of
these would be impractical if not impossible to be
provided as desktop applications. A better example
of SaaS as the “disruptive technology” changing the
way we do things, is Google Docs which offers itself
as an alternative to traditional office suite
applications at no cost. Google Docs offers less
features than traditional office products, but offers
benefits such as online access to your documents and
easy workgroup collaboration.

Fig 1 – Traditional vs. SaaS Software

The most common example of a successful
professional SaaS application is the SalesForce
Customer Relationship Manager (CRM). SalesForce
has won numerous awards and their user base has
grown from 5,000 to 50,000 clients (including
Chyron) since 2001 and is on an exponential growth
path. First of all, Salesforce is a well designed
application that provides real benefits to their
customers. SaaS will not make a bad application
better. But the SaaS model proved to be a compelling
advantage for SalesForce in the CRM market, for
many of the reasons I will now describe.
WHAT ARE THE ADVANTAGES OF SAAS?
SaaS has many benefits for both the vendor and the
client over traditional software models. SaaS saves
the client money because rather than having a large
upfront fee like traditional purchased software, SaaS
is usually sold on a subscription model. You “pay as
you go” with a monthly or yearly fee per seat or per
service. That means better return on investment since
the investment is small. SaaS applications are usually
very scalable and you pay for services as you need
them. It is easy to add or remove users as your needs
change so you don’t need to pay up front for your
eventual long term needs.
The client also benefits from not needing to purchase
and maintain the IT hardware to run the application.
You do not need to tie up engineering and IT
resources maintaining the software, backing up data,
installing updates, or debugging problems when they
arise. Your staff can focus on producing good
content and not maintaining their software tools.
SaaS saves you time, because in many cases a SaaS
application can be up and running almost
immediately. You just log on. You do not need to
plan ahead to purchase and install hardware. You do
not need to wait for the vendor to come on-site to
commission the system. Software updates and bug
resolutions can happen immediately and
transparently, you don’t need to schedule times for
the vendor to come and install updates.
With SaaS, the vendor is providing more than just the
software application and a hardware platform, they
are providing a 24 by 7 service and are responsible
for ensuring that it works smoothly. This eliminates
finger pointing, misunderstanding and delays. The
vendor is constantly on-site and monitoring usage for
problems. They likely have numerous clients and are
learning how to improve the product through a
variety of user experiences.
SaaS simplifies the vendor’s job by eliminating the
need to distribute software and ensuring it is properly
installed on the client’s hardware. Updates are
installed immediately and there are never any
“versioning” problems. Customer service costs are
kept to a minimum because service calls are not
needed. The vendor maintains physical control of the
software at all times.
The SaaS ‘community’ benefits from economies of
scale and can afford to provide a much higher level
of redundancy and security in their infrastructure than
could the individual client at a given cost.
In today’s mobile environment, there are
collaboration benefits to a hosted SaaS application
offering centralized data storage with ubiquitous web
access. Before Chyron adopted the SalesForce CRM,
each salesperson had their own contact database
which they would occasionally update. They didn’t
always have access to their own database when they
were on the road. Customer Service and Sales had
different contact info and there was little sharing of
information between them. SalesForce unified all the
contact and customer information into a single
database that is remotely available to everyone,
whether they are in their office, at home or on the
road. It is instantly updated across the board. New
contact information can be entered once and
everyone has it. For instance, a record of a service
issue is immediately available to the salesperson so
that they can follow up.
WHAT ARE THE CONCERNS ABOUT SAAS?
Broadcasters are constantly adopting new
technologies, and with every change the benefits
have to be weighed against the risks. What are the
risks associated with the SaaS solution? And, more
importantly, how do they compare to the risks of
hosting the application yourself?
The most common concerns about SaaS solutions are
availability and security. How do I know if the
application will be available when I need it? Will it
be more or less available than if I host it myself and
at what cost? As was described in the previous
section, it is usually the case that the SaaS vendor’s
infrastructure can take advantage of economies of
scale to build a more reliable and fault tolerant
system then you could afford to have in-house. And
if there are problems in the application, the vendor’s
staff is available to diagnose and fix the problem
immediately, in many cases even before you know
you had a problem.
Many prospective SaaS users may think, “What if my
Internet connection goes down?” While that is a
valid point, modern IT practices provide extremely
high levels of availability, redundancy and security.
The Internet has become a “mission critical”
component of almost every industry, and tremendous
resources are committed to keeping it working
smoothly. Large scale Internet outages are so rare
that they are international news when they occur.
Localized outages can be managed by your service
provider. No doubt you have been using the Internet
in production for many years and have a proven track
record with your local provider. Backup plans can
and should be in place. A downed Internet
connection would affect much more than the one
SaaS application. Especially in news production, the
broadcaster is fully dependent on their Internet
connection to get the information they need.
How safe and secure is my data? Once again this is a
valid concern, and a prospective SaaS customer
should ask the right questions and ensure that the
vendor provides the necessary levels of safety and
security; data backup procedures, redundancy in
hardware and power systems and geographic
redundancy. Is the application scalable in case there
is a sudden peak in usage? Will the data be available
to me in a form that I can use outside of the hosted
system? Compare all this to the level of safety and
security you can provide if you bring the application
in house. Managed and backed up data storage has a
real cost, just ask your IT manager. The SaaS vendor
has the advantage of economy of scale lowering the
relative costs of this storage. The bottom line is that
the SaaS vendor’s job to provide availability and
security along with the application.
THE SAAS INFRASTRUCTURE
A SaaS application must be hosted on robust
infrastructure in order to provide the necessary
availability, security and speed. A Data Center is
required that provides high availability of services;
reliable redundant equipment, power, cooling, fire
protection, physical security, managed storage and
high Internet bandwidth. It also must provide around
the clock maintenance and support staff in case of
problems.
Maintaining a private data center is not cost effective
for the typical SaaS application, instead they are
hosted on a shared data center called a “collocation
center” (or ‘colo’). The colo is operated by a third
party and provides the basic physical infrastructure
including extremely high speed links into Internet
peering points to guarantee a high speed connections
to anywhere on the Internet.
The SaaS vendor leases space and bandwidth at the
colo facility and is responsible for providing the
necessary computer hardware. It can range from a
single server to one or more 19” racks. A typical
SaaS application requires at a minimum a web server
and a database server. Since there should be no
“single point of failure” both the web server and the
database should have redundancy built in. A simple
clustered server has an active online server and a hot
backup. If the online server fails the cluster
management application switches the application
over to the hot backup.
A SaaS application that wants to increase throughput
will use a “load balancing” system to share the
workload among multiple redundant online servers.
Each web access is routed by the load balancer to the
next available server. Load balancing requires some
method of persisting a user’s session information
from one request to the next.
A SaaS vendor may also want to plan for geographic
redundancy, a second hosting facility located far
away from the first with a means to fail over or load
balance between the two. That ensures availability of
the application in case there is a catastrophic failure
of the primary colo facility.
Cloud computing refers to another new hosting
technology that different than collocation centers. In
cloud computing, IT resources, computing hardware
and storage, are a commodity similar to gas or
electricity provided by a service provider. Amazon
started offering spare resources from their vast
stockpile of computers and today their Elastic
Compute Cloud (EC2) charges per hour for CPU
resources and per gigabyte to move data in and out of
the ‘cloud’. Google, Microsoft and less well known
companies provide cloud computing resources.
The pros and cons of cloud computing are similar to
those of SaaS, but in cloud computing the IT
resources themselves are the product not the
application. And you can easily see that the
availability of almost limitless cloud of on-demand
computing resources provided by some of the biggest
names in the industry will encourage the growth of
SaaS applications of many kinds.
A BROADCAST SAAS APPLICATION
Not too long ago, television production equipment
was mostly custom ‘big iron’ hardware. When
broadcast software applications running on PCs first
appeared it was felt they were too slow and
unreliable. But some of these applications had
compelling benefits and managed to work their way
in. Today if you walk through the equipment room
it’s hard to find a piece of equipment that isn’t a PC.
The transition to SaaS applications is the next
inevitable step.
AXIS is Chyron’s hosted online content creation
system. It is an example of a broadcast solution that
truly benefits from being a SaaS application. AXIS
is web based tool for creating hardware independent
images and animations for a variety of television,
web and print applications. It requires no special
hardware, technical setup or administration
management. AXIS was designed for operational
and technical simplicity and low operational cost. It
was designed to be easy enough to be used by
anyone, and yet still deliver compelling and relevant
content.
AXIS works using a variety of common news
templates and tools to populate them. The producer
logs in, selects a template and proceeds to assemble
the desired graphic or animation. Weather graphics
are automatically populated with online weather data.
Quotes and charts are generated from real time
market information. Street level maps are generated
from web based mapping software. Full screens and
OTSs are composited from a library of images using
a unique and intuitive web interface. AXIS interfaces
Fig. 2 Building News Graphics with AXIS SaaS
to AP and Reuters’ image libraries and can store a
station’s own images for easy reuse. And it is even
possible to use AXIS’s Order Management System to
order and track special graphics you may need from
your own art department or artists elsewhere on the
network.
When the graphic assembly is complete, it is
downloaded from the AXIS servers using HTTP,
FTP or email to whatever final destination you want.
When used with Chyron’s CAMIO system, it can be
dropped into a news rundown and sent directly to the
playout hardware. But the output assets are hardware
independent and could be sent to any device.
AXIS benefits from being a SaaS web service
because it can be accessed from anywhere on the
Internet with just a browser which means more
people can use it and from more places. It enables
content creation from the field, telecommuting and
easy collaboration among different users.
Centralized storage of all the assets means that they
are easier to protect, back up and share. You create a
set of graphics for today’s top news stories once and
using them across multiple stations in your broadcast
group or network.
Having AXIS online also means that it is easily
integrated into the various data sources, web based
map data, weather data, and stock quotes are
available to the application online. Only one
connection needs to be maintained, and that one is
maintained by the SaaS vendor. This reduces your
maintenance and other overhead costs, increases your
speed and efficiency in getting great graphics to air.
A SAAS CASE STUDY
Gannett Broadcasting recently centralized its
graphics production across 23 television stations
using the benefits of SaaS at the core of that
endeavor. It is a great example of how SaaS can help
broadcast production workflows change for the
better, creating better content while saving time and
money. It also shows how the transition can be fast
and smooth.
Fig.3 - Web Interface for Graphics Assembly
Tiffani Lupenski, Executive Producer at 9News,
KUSA-TV, Denver, is part of the Gannett TV
Stations group and talks about their experiences
adopting AXIS over the past four months. She
describes KUSA as a “very, very graphics intensive
station” and says that the reaction to the program was
different across the various Gannett stations.
According to Lupenski, “In short, stations that didn’t
have a lot of graphic capability loved it right away
because they instantly got so much more capability
than they ever had before. For those who are already
doing a lot of graphics, there’s more of a learning
curve to get up to speed, but once you get there you
can really begin to exploit its capabilities at a higher
level.”
How graphics intensive is KUSA? Lupenski said, “I
personally make 5-10 graphics per day using AXIS.
My 10 o’clock producer is extraordinarily graphics
focused and will probably use 10-15 alone, and that
doesn’t count our OTS’s for every story … anywhere
from 10-20 stories per newscast. Other graphics are
full screens, mugs, charts, maps. We particularly like
the bar graph and pie chart functions, which we’re
having quite a bit of fun with right now. So, if you
add up all of the OTS’s, the banners and everything
else, you’re looking at around 25-35 AXIS graphics
per show, and we produce 10 hours of news per day.”
KUSA obviously had high expectations and high
demands for their look, and so were very thorough in
their evaluation of what AXIS could do for them.
Gannett in general worked very closely with Chyron,
the SaaS vendor, to improve the product and ensure
that it was tailored to their needs.
Training is an important part of any new product
introduction. KUSA wanted to make it a
collaborative process. “We really felt like it should be
an entire newsroom effort”, said Lupenski. KUSA
established a broad-based training program to teach
reporters, anchors, assignment desk editors,
producers, and photographers how to use the system.
Lupenski adds, “Those of us who use it more
frequently are a little more efficient with it, but there
are now literally dozens of people in our newsroom
who can make a map, build a full screen graphic or
get a mug shot on the air in pretty short order.
“Initially there was skepticism by some about the
idea of having to rely on SaaS to generate graphics as
well as learning how to do their own. Our approach
to getting over that hurdle was a good one in that
getting more people to use the product helped to
eliminate some of that fear. As everyone well knows,
there’s a lot of change going on in the industry as a
whole right now where a lot of us have to learn new
skills and do a whole lot more than we’ve ever had to
do before.”
Fig.4 - Online Image Database
KUSA is now in a position where although it has a
group of artists that work on bigger and more
complicated projects, it’s no longer necessary to have
a full time graphic artist on staff.
Lupenski added, “We’re seeing more and more ways
that we can make AXIS work for us. I think that
where people had trepidations about it, we’ve worked
really, really hard to train them, with a lot of follow
up, getting it into the hands of the directors as well,
and field reporters who are learning how to use it
more and more. We’re now absolutely in a place
where we can’t do without it.”
Fig. 5 - AXIS Generated Map Graphic
In the past four months, a time where most new
products are still going through a commissioning and
training phase, this flexibility and power has already
helped improve their graphics look. In situations such
as morning shows and weekend morning shows
where they didn’t have a graphic artist available, their
graphics were limited. According to Lupenski, “That
situation is now totally gone. We now have a lot
more graphic capabilities and people who are able to
use it.
“It hasn’t happened yet – but I’m really intrigued
about a scenario where a breaking news story
happens, maybe at the weekend while I’m sitting at
home, and I can make an AXIS graphic and get it on
air without ever having to go to the station.”
And finally, when asked if there were any concerns
about SaaS, primarily the common question of what
would happen if the Internet went down, Lupenski
replied, “Yes, in the very early stages of this
transition several people were worried about AXIS
being a web-based program. Their concern was that
we would lose all graphics capability if for some
reason the Internet went down. That fear went away
relatively quickly simply because it never has gone
down. And, we weighed the risk/benefit and felt if
we lost Internet capability -- our graphics would be
the least of our concerns.”
CONCLUSION
This paper described SaaS as a new technology that
has great promise. It was shown how the SaaS model
has many advantages over traditional software
applications and lower cost, and how many
applications across many industries and consumer
products are moving in that direction. A case study
of one such application was presented that described
the real life advantages and cost savings of SaaS in
news graphics production.
SaaS applications in broadcast production are still at
a relatively early stage. I would expect that they will
grow to provide yet unexpected benefits, as
“disruptive technologies” usually do. The question
then is not whether the broadcast industry should use
SaaS, but for how long it can afford not to.