Role

• Daily Operations Manager of Content Distribution

Goals

• Manage documentation of all stations and their rights.

• Collaborate with the Affiliates group to onboard stations and update retrans rights in documentation.

• Interface with GMO to ensure that requests from the Affiliates group are completed.

• Troubleshoot feed and streaming issues by connecting with various groups.

Experience

• Jonathan has been the Daily Operations of Content Distribution for almost 2 years. Prior to that, he was at Media Quality Manager at NBCU for about 4 years.

Day-to-Day I

• Onboarding Stations

  • The Cross Platform team under Content Distribution does research to find how many stations are out there and which stations need to be onboarded and launched and they work directly with GMO.

  • The support team as well as the support group work out a deal which goes back and forth between the partners and our affiliates and whether or not they have the rights. They vet out all the business ends.

  • After all the business deals have been done, the Affiliates team go forward with technologically getting their stations ready to send the feed, they will send the encoders to the station and the station will implement that into their system and the feed will come out.

    • The feeds work by going from NBC as a national feed broadcasted from 30 Rock into the satellite and this local station will take that feed and go through its encoder and repurpose certain slots for their local programming and go out to the partners to go to the consumers.

  • Once they’re onboarded in that sense and they’ve signed with Dish or Sling or whoever the partner is, they integrate the other teams and then it goes into in-market support. Then, the Content Management team comes in and adds that station to the list of call signs.

Day-to-Day II

• Station rights management workflow from the Affiliates group to Content Distribution to GMO

  • The Affiliates group e-mails Content Distribution with a request to either blacklist or whitelist a station based on negotiations

  • Content Distribution will send a side note to the Affiliates group saying they’ll be working with GMO on it. They’ll also update the NBC Retrans Rights spreadsheet and send an e-mail to GMO about the request.

  • GMO will look at the NBC Retrans Rights spreadsheet and carry out the changes.

  • Once GMO is done with the changes, they’ll go into the NBC Retrans Rights spreadsheet and put “Confirm” in the “GMO Confirmed” column and e-mail Content Distribution to let them know the request has been fulfilled.

  • Content Distribution will email the Affiliates team again saying the station has either been blacklisted or whitelisted.

Tools Used

• MVPD Admin

• Google Sheets & Docs

• Outlook

Pain Points

• All of the processes are managed on Google Sheets and Docs.

  • There are multiple spreadsheets and updating and managing them gets complicated.

  • This is insecure given the confidential nature of the documents.

  • This also creates obstacles when it comes to reporting information, since there are many Google Sheets to account for.

  • There is also poor accountability and changes tracking that comes with using Google Sheets and Docs.

• When the MVPD Admin tool was first implemented, everything was a 1-1 click.

• The current station rights management workflow requires a lot of back and forth communication (especially e-mails) between three different teams.

Wants

• Move away from reliance on Google Sheets and Docs to house important internal information

• Record archival of stations that have been retired for future-proofing

• Log of changes

• A filterable chart to house records of onboarded stations

• Reporting functionality that is quicker, cleaner, and better – i.e., ability to generate dashboards and metrics easily

• Bulk edit functionality that will account for 1-1 mapping and multitude:

  • Blacklist all partners for one stations

  • Blacklist all stations for one partner

  • Find a way to group stations that two disputing partners have

• Expedite and automate the current station rights management workflow

  • It would be ideal if the Affiliates team can go in the system and enter the retrans rights. Content Management will look at it and approve or not. If the dispute is approved, the system will automatically do the switch

• Commenting feature

Work Behavior & Rules

• There is a cross platform team under Content Distribution under Carmen Palmer and they do the research to find how many stations are out there and which stations need to be onboarded and launched and they work directly with GMO.

• Every single one of the deals teams manages a certain partner. Thus, a user may need to filter through partners.

• Contract negotiations and rights changes happen once or twice each quarter only.

• Blacklisting is when we and the station are at an impasse with negotiations. Whitelisting is essentially when the station is good to go and the agreement is signed.

• Currently, there are multiple spreadsheets being used by the Affiliates team, Content Management, and GMO to manage the retrans rights and stations.

  • NBC Retrans Rights spreadsheet

    • This spreadsheet shows all the stations and tells us which stations are currently at an impasse with negotiations with a certain MVPD (this MVPD ID is put under the RETRANS-BLACKLIST column).

    • Columns A-D (in order from left to right): Call Sign, RETRANS-BLACKLIST, Update Date, GMO Confirmed

    • Content Management updates columns: RETRANS-BLACKLIST and Update Date

    • GMO controls the GMO Confirmed column

  • GCP Affiliate Rights spreadsheet

    • This spreadsheet shows all the stations and the partners they never had a contract with.

    • Columns A-G (in order from left to right): CALL SIGN (in Launch Priority Order), Partner-BLACKLIST, Request Date, GMO STATUS, Distribution Update, Additional Distribution Update, GMO Update Date.

    • The GDP Affiliate Rights sheet was created previously as something to be utilized but they condensed it down based off of the different agreements. The sheet used by Jonathan’s team is the best to choose for this project is the NBC Retrans Rights spreadsheet.

• The Affiliates group gives Content Management all the information regarding all our stations and the rights and disputes or contracts with the various parent companies. They own that relationship.

• GMO owns the actual stream feeds and deals with the actual delivery of those items.

• Some stations fall under a parent company; for example, there could be over 100 stations with 7 parent companies.

Miscellaneous

• It makes sense to Jonathan to name the station rights and entitlements “Retrans Rights”. It is important to drive home that Retrans Rights is operational-based.

• From a production perspective, a staging level environment could be used for testing something new on the stream without affecting production. However, we should figure out if it may be something needed for other purposes in the future before deciding if there needs to be a staging environment.

• User permissions may need to be set up if the current station rights management workflow was expedited and automated.

  • An example is if the Affiliates team goes in the system and enters the retrans rights. Content Management will look at it and approve or not. If the dispute is approved, the system will automatically do the switch. This may require different users to go into MVPD Admin and have the ability to only edit certain fields.