The Digital Video Services Manager manages the back-end process of rights management by collaborating with the Content Distribution team to update the GDT table used in localization, the retrans rights table, and the affiliate rights table. After receiving these changes from Content Distribution, the Digital Video Services Manager works with vendors to ensure that they are also updated in production. This ensures that customers will be able to go through the authentication and authorization process when accessing one of our video.
For each interview, we prepared separate scripts to ask more contextual questions per participant.
For the interview with the Digital Video Services Manager, we focused on daily responsibilities, who they work with and pain-points with carrying out their work.
Our Script for our Digital Video Services Manager Interview
Interview walkthrough with the Digital Video Services Manager at NBCU NYC/LA
Interview walkthrough with a Digital Video Services Manager at NBC at NBCU NYC/LA
Work with Content Distribution to get GDT information.
Ensure that changes to retrans rights and the GDT table are updated on the back-end by vendor services.
Work closely, back and forth, with Content Distribution to fulfill blacklist/update requests.
Replace TKX services and remove reliance on third party services like Google and Anvato.
Improve and expedite current time-consuming, manual, and communication-heavy workflows due to TKX services by moving vendor services into our own architecture and technical stack.
Mark has been a Product Manager at NBCU for about 4 years. He has over ten years of experience with video products.
Working with Content Distribution to handle retrans rights
Content Distribution updates the spreadsheet and alerts the GMO team via e-mail that a retrans between a station and a partner is currently in place.
GMO will talk to the vendors to update the change.
Vendors will make the changes happen on the back-end.
GMO will test the change in a production environment.
Once GMO confirms that the change has been made, they confirm it in the spreadsheet and e-mail Content Distribution that the request has been fulfilled.
Adding/Changing information in the GDT table
Content Distribution sends GMO a d-list of changes and relevant information.
GMO will add those changes to the GDT table.
Onboarding a station
The GMO team works with Content Distribution to set up a new station.
GMO will need to get information from Content Distribution to update the GDT table.
Afterwards, GMO passes that update to their vendor and they will handle it on their back-end (GMO does not have exposure to this, but they are essentially updating a table).
Updating this table can take up to two weeks for their vendor, Anvato.
When a station is onboarded, all affiliates are assumed as whitelisted and then the blacklisted ones are assigned.
Microsoft Excel
Google Sheets
Postman – a TKX service that gets leveraged on the back-end
It creates an endpoint between the tables to determine a user’s rights
Anvato
Lack of a log of changes
Lack of automation to allow changes made by Content Distribution to update automatically on GMO’s back-end services
Currently, Content Distribution may make changes to the spreadsheets without letting GMO know since the communication between them is very manual and prone to human error. Thus, GMO wouldn’t know what got changed or updated and they are the ones who need to manually send these spreadsheets to Anvato.
The current process of handling retrans rights is very manual and communication-heavy.
Lack of transparency from the vendors about how they are running their back-end services for us and what they are configuring.
Failure to meet the 48 hr SLAs since the vendors can take up to a month to make simple configuration updates.
A logging system or method of automation where rights changes made by Content Distribution are updated on GMO’s back-end services without manual communication and processes.
Currently, Content Distribution may make changes to the spreadsheets without letting GMO know since the communication between them is very manual and prone to human error. Thus, GMO wouldn’t know what got changed or updated and they are the ones who need to manually send these spreadsheets to Anvato.
Remove the heavy communication and manual workflow by automating the process of handling retrans rights in MVPD Admin.
This will give Content Distribution the power to update the rights directly in MVPD Admin without the back and forth conversation with GMO.
Greater transparency as to how our back-end services are running and being configured.
This is a huge reason why we are moving off from our vendor services and putting these services into our own architecture and technical stack.
Ability to make quick updates directly in MVPD Admin without vendor reliance.
A production and staging environment
Staging would be useful if Content Distribution wants to test anything (new features, new logos, new entitlement rule, new data, etc.) in the future.
However, they can also make direct updates in production
Ability to single upload, bulk upload, and edit the GDT table for onboarding new territory or stations.
Excel sheets we’ve seen (i.e., GDT table, retrans rights, and affiliate rights) are generally handed off to Google and ingested into their back-end services. The GMO team does not have a lot of exposure to what happens in the back-end.
There are currently 4 different Excel spreadsheets the GMO team looks at and passes to Anvato and they represent different business cases:
GDT Table
NBC Retrans Rights
MVPD ID
GCP Affiliate Rights
Anvato is the vendor GMO currently uses for these entitlements and schedule checks for the video site.
Retrans Rights
Onboarding stations
GMO would set up zip codes in that market
Content Distribution would go in and add all the data associated with the zip codes in that market, including the logos and such information, since they would ideally be the team managing it.
For a local market, there are 2 main rights they check:
A retrans: From a business standpoint, this is checking that there is a contract that is in place, but it is being negotiated, it might be at impasse, so we have to block playback until they finalize the contract.
These blocks are very short-term and are reflected to customers as blackouts.
GMO also references the MVPD ID chart to find MVPD IDs based on MVPDs written in the Retrans Rights sheet.
GCP Affiliate Rights spreadsheet shows partner blacklists, or partners a station never had a contract with.
For example, ATTOTT never had a contract to air the affiliate, WTLV, so this partner needs to be blacklisted.
On this spreadsheet, if a partner in the “Partner-Blacklist” column gets a contract, the “Distribution Update” column gets a note added saying which partner got removed from the blacklist column and was whitelisted.
Retrans and partners with no contracts have different error codes that return on the back-end.
You can have a market that would have both a partner blacklist and a retrans.
A single partner for a market can only live in the retrains list or blacklist; it can never simultaneously live in both lists.
All of the partners start off as whitelist and then GMO goes and blacklists specific stations.
The Retrans Rights spreadsheet is currently updated by Jonathan’s team in Content Distribution.
Authentication and authorization process
Authentication is when a user puts in their cable service (i.e., Comcast) credentials. This makes sure that they are an actual Comcast user.
Authorization checks to make sure you have access to that specific content – it will go through a retrans check, passing user information to the localization and retrans service to look up that market to validate if the user has access to that content.
GDT Table
This table is specifically for localization because it defines local NBC markets, which includes zip codes that match up to a certain affiliate/call sign.
GMO currently does not have an interface where they deal with the GDT tables.
Station logos
The management of these logos is done on Anvato’s back-end and is not managed directly through spreadsheets.
An ask for MVPD Admin is to have users identify the market and put in any additional information associated with that market in the table, which includes the logos.
For O&Os which are our own and operated stations like WNBC and KNBC, they send Content Distribution the logos directly because they’re a part of our group.
Although it is currently unclear if Content Distribution, the affiliates group, or the stations themselves providing the station logos, GMO still passes them directly to Anvato and they are updating it on their localization service to reference that image with that market.
Hzip vs. Gzip validation
Hzip is tied to a user’s account information, so when a user logs in with their credientials to watch streams, we will take the zip code associated with their account.
Gzip is where a user is physically located.
When this check occurs, the system identifies whether the user is authorized to watch the content from their account and whether or not they have access to the account where they are physically located.
Gzip always takes precedence over hzip.
Information for the GDT table is provided to GMO by Content Distribution (they get it from Nielson and the Affiliates group) and GMO can go in and add/make edits to the GDT table.
The vendors have not exposed to us how they are doing their services and what they are configuring on the back-end.
Assumed vendors workflow
The vendor currently goes in, take these tables and then actually update their configurations on the tables that GMO provides. On their side, it’s a config, so they might be just doing an overwrite directly on the JSON file, and if it’s large data like the GDT table, they’ll probably do a bulk update and ingest it.
Proposed architecture for the new additions to MVPD Admin
We would make a request from the client side from an apps and services, then this would go through an orchestration layer, the Cloudpath services in middle, (that’s Priyanka’s team). Then, there are these services that we would enable and one of them would be the user authentication and entitlement service, which will grab any information coming in from the client to determine their the zip code and other pertinent information. Then, we would look up the localization in the GDT table, which would be in the digital content services, to identify the associated market and the associated rights. Then, it would pass information back to entitlement services, and we would parse that information in and either allow playback or not.
If there is no contract, then we would block playback. If there is a retrans, then there will be a certain error code associated to it. If it is an MVPD blacklisting, then we would provide another error code as well and we just pass that back to the client.
Anvato TKX Live Services workflow
Retrans rights
GDP affiliate rights – associated with the blacklisting of partners
Streaming rights – done in Postman
Impacted by TV rights, MVPD rights, or streaming rights
Basically notifies whether or not a market is turned on or has live stream available
There is a streaming rights spreadsheet housed in Google Drive
VOD will be set up for a station before live streaming because it requires more work, like sending encoders to the stations.
There are additional tables associated to other blacklistings that GMO does, and this can be based on your market and whether or not you have access to certain content, like sports content.
User permissions may need to be set up to, for example, to handle production and staging environments.
