Playout Director

Contract: 6 month fixed term contract

Reporting to: Supervisor, Operations

Hours of work: Day and night shifts, averaging 40 hours per week

Main Purpose:

The Playout Director plays a critical role in ensuring the smooth delivery of channel playout and content prep requirements within the transmission suite. This position incorporates three fundamental functions; channel playout monitoring and control, spot check QC and preview and live line up and records for a tier 1 public service broadcaster.

The role will be working across a shift rotation of dayshifts and night shifts 24/7/365 and at any one time working on one of the three positions per shift that delivers the core functions. Effective communication skills and professionalism is required to deal directly with the client, routinely managing both server playout and high-profile live events and working alongside a live continuity announcer.

The team of Playout Directors will be working together across the service requirements, implementing and maintaining ‘best practice’ SOPs and delivering maximum service levels to ensure client satisfaction.

Principal Responsibilities:

Media Management

• Coordinate any missing material
• Deliver transmission master material to playout in a timely manner, some programming may be delivered within a few hours of transmission.
• Coordinate the handling of proxy files for ‘late and live’ content, commercial copy or any material failing Auto QC and/or integrity checks
• Manually ingest content, including but not limited to, recordings of incoming live content.
• Multi-point spot checks per all programme content. Any faults detected will need to be reported back to key stakeholders.
• Coordinating quick turnaround content for TX, including recording line feeds, playing as lives or fast track ingest. Logging timecodes and making sure the scheduled playout is updated.
• Overseeing automated content management processes and responding to any issues.
• Manually push material to playout for TX if required.
• Spot check failures notified to the key stakeholders to facilitate correction and/or redelivery of the material.
• Coordinating the delivery, ingest and processing of both advanced schedules and the daily final TX Schedule
• Supplying content to the client as and when requested
• Managing commercial content with the commercial suppliers and arrange and manage any redelivery due to QC failures.
• QC checking access services content.

Live Event preparation

• Working knowledge of the BT and client OS lines
• Knowledge of television specifications in HD and SD, analogue and digital and audio specifications.
• Understand the EDM and client network and facilities in order to enact back-up procedures in case of emergencies.
• To operate the playout automation system to enable video recording and playback of material.
• Initial point of contact between any outside source and EDM playout.
• Coordinating with the contribution partners to perform a line up and communicating clear and precise details with the client and playout.
• Monitor and manage the incoming feeds during any live events.
• Escalate any technical issues relating to incoming lines to Support Engineering.

Playout

• Appending, monitoring, and maintaining routine daily schedules provided by the client as they play out from the broadcast automation.
• Understanding and routinely monitoring the various core elements of the Service, including video, audio, graphics, SCTE, delay services, access services, blanking events.
• Monitoring the various hand-off points, including OTT and reporting and escalating any issues
• Exceptional knowledge of the playout automation, understanding the levels of manual intervention available and confidence to use them.
• Quick and direct response to resolve any issues with any element within the playout…