Inside an SCN Edit Suite, Multimedia Producer Andrew Kaytor prepares on-air station identification and interstitial material using Apple’s Final Cut Pro nonlinear editing software. Three clicks and his creation can be on-air.

A new workflow so simple, so revolutionary, it will be televised!

A small Canadian software firm is putting a bee in the bonnet of television broadcasters around the world.

It is revolutionizing the way the TV industry works, and the way its work flows.

Having waited over 10 years for the opportunity (and the means) to establish its own state-of-the-art broadcast facility, the Saskatchewan Communications Network (SCN) saw a way to enhance its capabilities and economize on its expenses thanks to BUG.tv, a software developer and broadcast service provider based in Lévis, Quebec.

TV stations have long been home to some of the most technically demanding, operationally complicated and financially intimidating infrastructures around.

Now, with the transition to digital (DTV) and high definition (HDTV) production and distribution, those challenges — and the resources required to meet them — will only grow in size and scope.

That is, until BUG.tv came along. Its mission is to simplify the system and process of delivering television content — and to add value along the way.

Its impact is already being felt in broadcast facilities around the world: large scale, mass-audience, deep-pocketed networks like NBC, as well as smaller, niche market, public-sector supported broadcasters like SCN, have already been bitten by the BUG.

And its platform of choice — Apple hardware, and the Mac OS X operating system.

“From the beginning, we knew we were going to the Mac,” says BUG.tv CEO François Savard. “Our ideas just wouldn’t work on any other platform. Its stability, its open and extensible development environment, its integration with well-known media productivity tools like Final Cut Pro,” he itemizes. “Even the powerful Finder underscored the reasons for making Apple our platform of choice.”

BUG is an acronym for ‘Broadcast Unifying Gears’. The company’s goal is to simplify and unify the different processes, platforms and workflows (BUG.tv calls them Air Flows™, because they are now so light and easy to manage) found in many TV stations today.

Our ideas just wouldn’t work on any other platform. Its stability, its open and extensible development environment, its integration with well-known media productivity tools like Final Cut Pro, even the powerful Finder underscored the reasons for making Apple our platform of choice.

Savard says broadcasters have to focus on the container, not the content, as a result of the different technologies and practices found in the marketplace. Yet the process by which programming is acquired, packaged and distributed is often a TV station’s sole unique differentiator.

TV stations need strong, identifiable personalities, and yet they must appear accessible and approachable to the viewers. But the creative on-air presentation is often dictated by external industry trends, manufacturer development cycles, restrictive costs and diminishing returns.

BUG.tv’s approach is to use off-the-shelf hardware to do TV, Savard says simply. BUG.tv combines open, extensible computing platforms from Apple, and user-customizable software-based command and control tools that BUG.tv programmers develop, in order to simplify TV workflows and create new broadcast opportunities.

“One of the challenges that broadcasters face is to follow the rapid pace of technology and equipment evolution in the marketplace,” Savard describes. “Technology is imposing solutions on TV stations, and manufacturers are saying, in effect, ‘If you want to work, follow my workflow, use my system, buy my equipment.’

“The fact that equipment often takes years of R & D, and lots of money in the process, often means purchasers are locked into a decision and forced to stay in one place as companies recover those costs,” he adds.

The solution, Savard says, is to work in an environment where the focus is not the operation itself, but rather on the task at hand, and the end goal.