S4M bug with reading cuesheets with end credits

TV Broadcasters divide their broadcast time into segments indicated on cuesheets. These cuesheets contain information detailing what content to display at specific times. Each of these information bits contain the type of event to broadcast (show segment or commercial), as well as the timecodes when they start and end. The timecodes are a little different than regular timestamps, as in addition to hours, minutes and seconds, they contain the number of frames, as a second can be divided into 30 frames, and a frame is the smallest unit of time possible for TV broadcasting.

Each broadcast trafficking system has their own cuesheet format; S4M uses XML. However, the information contained in these cuesheets is generally the same, regardless of the type of trafficking system used. Usually this is unimportant as most television broadcasters only use one trafficking system, but what happens when a television station buys another? There is the opportunity to inherit a new trafficking system, and thus the opportunity to share information between the systems to provide visibility to the executives.

So what is the best way to store cuesheet information so it can be imported by different broadcast trafficking systems and be visible to the executives? I recommend storing the data in an ECM (Enterprise Content Management) system and providing customizations to export it in different trafficking systems’ formats.

For my particular scenario, EMC Documentum was chosen because of its rich media features and completeness of ECM features (I’m sure that my being a big fan of Documentum had nothing to do with it.) What we decided was to create a taxonomy in the repository that organized television shows by seasons and episode versions, and store the cuesheet information as metadata of the episode version objects. I’ll blog more on the taxonomy structure in the future; for now, I would like to focus on the cuesheets.

In the S4M cuesheets are 2 node types: SEC and EEC. These timecodes are computed values from the VO Squeeze TC in attribute of the episode version, and they represent the end credits of a show. On Jan 15, 2009 we discovered a bug in S4M that would schedule programs with SEC and EEC timecodes incorrectly. It was placing the end credits as separate segments on the playlist when it should in fact be one segment.

Of course an urgent fix was requested from S4M, but what happens in the meantime? Master Control cannot handle the end credits properly so we needed a workaround immediately before we could generate new playlists. What we decided was to not print out the SEC and EEC timecodes until the fix was provided.

The implementation of the fix was relatively easy. I already made a WDK (Documentum's Web Development Kit) customization in Documentum to print the cuesheets, so I just added a configuration value to the component’s XML configuration file to determine whether to print SEC and EEC timecodes. If the value was present, the timecodes would be printed. Anything else would default to hiding the timecodes.

Therefore in production we currently have the value set to not print the end credits for S4M cuesheets. Once S4M releases a fix, I will release a new configuration file with the value set to print the end credits. Configuration files are insignificant work so the turnaround time will be under 30 minutes.