In the broadcasting industry, ensuring that your content meets quality standards and network requirements is paramount. The last thing any content creator wants is to have their files rejected, leading to extra time, effort, and resources. In this article, we'll discuss the intricacies of broadcast file rejection and explore strategies that we follow at Aberdeen to help our clients prevent file rejection.
How common is it to see stations reject files? In 2023, our AberFast team delivered approximately 88,000 broadcast files. Out of those final deliveries, 510 issues were flagged which could have led to station rejections.
What Challenges Do Content Creators Face?
Amid technological advancements throughout the broadcasting industry, adapting and adhering to the changes in compliance, FCC regulatory guidelines, and delivery requirements pose a significant challenge for many broadcast teams. From quality issues to content concerns and file delivery requirements, numerous factors can contribute to the rejection of broadcast files.
Common Causes of File Rejection
Over the years, through our interactions with station partners and experts, and in assisting clients with program delivery across various networks in the broadcasting industry, we have identified the following list as the most common causes for rejections.
Quality Issues
Content Concerns
Creative Issues
File Requirement Issues
Quality issues often top the list of reasons for file rejection. Whether it's video or audio-related, production and post-production processes can introduce issues that can result in content not meeting the broadcast quality standards. Additional causes like content concerns, such as the use of inappropriate or controversial material, and creative issues like effects or artifacts failing to meet the station’s broadcast requirements can lead to rejection. File requirements, including format, resolution, and aspect ratio, must also be met to ensure acceptance.
Strategies to Combat File Rejection Causes
Quality Issues
At Aberdeen, we prioritize quality assurance to minimize the risk of file rejection.
Every workflow established in our system involves multiple layers of human and automated QC using Telestream VidChecker, which is configured to check and correct video and audio levels to meet broadcast standards. Some of the checks include chroma levels, RGB gamut, field orders, cadence, stripe errors, analog and digital dropouts, audio phase coherence, dual mono detection, and true audio peaks. (If any of these terms are new to you, here’s a resource to keep handy: Tektronix Glossary of Video Terms & Acronyms)
Now, the question is why use both? Our goal has always been to exceed the quality expectations of our clients as they have entrusted us to deliver their files on their behalf. So adding both helps us identify and resolve quality issues that can be detected by humans and issues that can evade human detection. Some of the issues flagged by our QC team are related to captioning accuracy, audio loudness, interlacing, etc. while the automated QC helps identify issues related to the container, color levels, field orders, audio true peaks, etc.
Content/Creative/File Requirement Issues
In a constantly evolving industry, staying abreast of regulatory broadcast standards and station requirements is essential. We regularly connect with our station partners to understand their updated delivery requirements and guidelines, ensuring that our workflows are aligned with their needs.
One example of a station-wide content requirement that we recently had to address involved coordinating with some of our clients regarding a network disclaimer policy. One of our network partners informed us about a change in the disclaimer policy for paid programming. According to the new policy, a program could be rejected if it did not include a 5-second disclaimer at the beginning. We gathered the details of the new disclaimer requirements and passed them along to our clients, assisting them in incorporating this change.
This isn't the first time we've encountered such a situation, and it certainly won't be the last. Therefore, we document these updates and ensure our clients are informed about any new requirements, and during our manual quality control (QC) checks, we use this documented information to flag any issues that do not meet the specified requirements.
Are Strategies Alone Sufficient to Combat File Rejection?
Quality is non-negotiable for us. Over the years, we've learned to adapt and refine our processes to uphold the highest broadcast standards. Our automated QC software is regularly updated to align with broadcast standards and identify issues that may compromise quality. As mentioned earlier, we keep our station requirements up to date to serve our clients and make sure we deliver the correct file. In the event of any rejection, we follow a tested and proven engineered approach to conduct thorough investigations to pinpoint the root cause and implement preventive measures for the future.
Conclusion
While broadcast file rejection is a tough challenge, it is not something that cannot be prevented. We have learned over the years that the correct strategies like prioritizing quality assurance, staying informed about regulatory changes, and fostering collaborative relationships with network partners can help content creators minimize the risk of rejection and ensure seamless delivery of their content. We love our clients and want to help them navigate the complexities of broadcast file delivery with confidence and efficiency.
Delivering content to broadcast outlets is a critical final step in Aberdeen Broadcast Services' AberFast Transcoding & Station Delivery service. However, this process is more than just a digital file delivery service; it encompasses a comprehensive preparation of digital files before their final delivery.
On September 15, 2022, Matt Cook, the President of Aberdeen Broadcast Services, hosted an informative 30-minute webinar. This event provided an exclusive look into the AberFast service, offering a detailed walkthrough of the entire process, from the initial upload of content to its final broadcast. Matt Cook delved deep into various aspects of the service, including meticulous audio and video quality control, correction methods, and the intricacies of inserting graphics. He also explained the complexities involved in standards and resolution conversions, the nuances of transcoding, and the various methods of delivery.
Furthermore, the webinar introduced attendees to the station and client portals that Aberdeen offers. These portals are designed to give clients and stations real-time updates on their projects, ensuring transparency and efficiency in the process.
In 2021 alone, AberFast successfully delivered over 61,000 digital files, establishing itself as a reliable provider of broadcast-ready video files to broadcasting outlets globally. This webinar revealed the intricate processes and attention to detail that enable Aberdeen to deliver such high-quality, broadcast-ready content consistently.
At Aberdeen, we know the success of our company and our clients is dependent on the collective contributions and positive collaboration of all our team members. When we are all working toward the same goal, it’s important that each member of our team applies their areas of expertise and skills to achieve that goal. Successful teamwork balances a team’s abilities with the needs of the company, resulting in a more collaborative culture – and we’re all about that!
This carries over to our relationship with our clients. Our mantra has always been that when we come alongside your business, we’d like you to feel like we are an extension of your team. Think of our entire team as an additional member of yours that is always available – we’re the one that comes in early and stays late.
We recently took on a project from a long-time client and with all teams involved embracing that team-player mentality, communication was a breeze and everyone played a key role in coordinating a successful launch of our AberFast Lite service.
Here’s our President, Matt Cook, talking about what the value means to him along with a snippet from a discussion with our client on the project, John McKinnon of In Touch Ministries, where they discuss how the value of team players was the driving force behind everyone reaching their goal.
This approach to tackling projects together as a team is a huge factor behind the success and excellence we bring to our service every day. We look forward to working with you and your team.
In the fall of 2020, Aberdeen’s AberFast engineers were presented with a challenge: find an alternative for broadcasters who utilize satellite feeds to distribute their programming. The spectrum auction sanctioned by the FCC had cut the number of available satellite transponders in half, leaving broadcasters who use satellite feeds to be hit with premiums, overcharges, and even losing their feeds altogether.
The answer has been in front of us for a while: terrestrial IP-based file delivery.
Since 2010, our AberFast Station Delivery service has successfully delivered over half a million broadcast-ready files all over the world. We have been proving that IP-based program delivery is practical and the future of broadcast delivery which is why we heavily invested our time and money in this technology, allowing us to spin up a new service for satellite replacement:AberFast Lite.
Aberdeen recorded a video interview with the client to discuss the workflow and experience after a successful launch. Throughout the article, quotes and reference points are linked in blue and will take you to that part of the discussion in the video interview. The full video is available in the player at the end.
Client Profile: In Touch Ministries
In Touch Ministries is the outreach ministry of Dr. Charles Stanley, pastor of First Baptist Church of Atlanta, Georgia. After success with a half-hour religious program called The Chapel Hour, which began broadcasting in 1972, Stanley founded In Touch Ministries and began televising the In Touch program on The Christian Broadcasting Network in 1978. His program remains one of the longest-running religious broadcasts in the US, reaching more than 800 outlets through television and radio.
Awards and honors:
1988: National Religious Broadcaster’s Hall of Fame
1989: Named Clergyman of the Year by Religious Heritage of America
1989: NRB named In Touch with Television Producer of the Year
1999: In Touch named Radio Program of the Year
2017: Thomas Nelson Publishing recognizes Stanley for selling more than 3.5 million copies of his books
As one of Aberdeen’s long-time partners, In Touch Ministries began using Aberdeen’s services as a supplement to their in-house captioning & distribution workflow in 2010. After 11 years, our partnership continues to grow and Aberdeen now handles all of In Touch’s captioning and distribution for the television program.
Over the past 30 years, a significant amount of In Touch’s broadcast outlets have received the program via satellite delivery. For In Touch, the decision to use satellite for so long was heavily based on two factors: price and quality control. The ministry was always concerned about what would happen to the quality of the program when it was distributed through multiple mediums: tape, DVD, file, sat signal, etc. Satellite allowed them to “standardize” their broadcast – they knew that each station receiving the signal was receiving the same quality. However, the desire to standardize to a file-only option had been a hot topic with the ministry for years but nothing existed at the price point they needed and it was just still cheaper to deliver via satellite. Until now.
Because of the changing satellite service business and the FCC Spectrum sale cutting the number of available satellite feeds, In Touch was forced to change satellite providers five times over the last six years. Deadlines were becoming more of an issue when last-minute changes to a program forced their team to frantically resend a feed to hundreds of stations. It was at this time that McKinnon and his team turned to Aberdeen to find a solution.
The Solution
Since 2011, Aberdeen has been in the file-based, terrestrial delivery, space with their AberFast File Delivery service and has delivered over a half-million programs around the world. AberFast was introduced to provide significant financial savings for producers by eliminating tape and delivery costs associated with program delivery. It also allows producers to reach more broadcast outlets in high definition. Beyond financial savings, the AberFast service included a broadcast QC and correction of audio and video levels on all programs before delivery. Each station also received a broadcast-ready file transcoded to their preferred file specifications through a hand’s-off automated point-to-point upload to their servers along with email notifications.
So in the case of In Touch and a broadcast that reaches nearly 300 outlets weekly, how could they scale a terrestrial-based delivery to function similarly to a satellite signal that pushes the program out to all stations at once? Aberdeen now offers a more “lite” version of the full-service AberFast where most of the white-glove treatment is removed, but there is no sacrifice to the program's overall quality.
After surveying hundreds of stations, AberFast Lite settled on the five most commonly accepted file formats that will work in their automated ingest workflows. Each station will choose one format and receive the program through the same automated upload utilized for the full-service AberFast delivery. Stations will also have access to download the files from our online portal if they happen to move or delete the program. No more worries about “missing a feed” as the file will remain available well after the airdate.
The Results
In Touch Ministries has been off satellite since May of 2021 and is currently handling all of the distribution of their 30 & 60-minute weekly programs through Aberfast – station-specific versions are still running through the flagship AberFast service and where a single version is going to 50+ stations, AberFast Lite picks up the baton.
The launch of this service has proven to be such a successful alternative, that we’re thrilled to announce that the AberFast Lite service is available to all programmers who meet certain criteria and are sending a single-version program to 50+ TV stations. Want to see if your program qualifies? Contact us to have one of our engineers go through your workflows and present the appropriate solution. Learn more about the AberFast Lite setup process here.
The discussion between Matt Cook, President of Aberdeen Broadcast Services, and John McKinnon, Executive Director of Programming for In Touch Ministries referenced throughout this article can be viewed in its entirety below.
When we launched our new website last year, we also made the move host it on the .IO domain. Why? Because all of the advancements we're executing behind the scenes that help ensure we're captioning and delivering media in the most advanced and efficient way possible are connected by our application programming interfaces ("APIs") built on this domain. Having our website on the same domain is a reminder of our continued dedication to our clients to improve, and highlights one of our core values: to be solution driven.
Our most considerable investment was our move to the AWS platform – the gold standard in the industry and what more than 40% of cloud computing is run on. This move not only permitted us to work uninterrupted by the current global pandemic, but it also allows us to expedite those quick-turn broadcast deliveries for our clients without losing that personal touch or eyes-on review by our AberFast engineers that makes our video delivery service unique.
Here’s our President, Matt Cook, explaining how a client came to us with a new challenge of captioning and delivering time-sensitive content – where every minute counts – and how we found the perfect solution for them:
While the delivery time frame is shrinking, viewers still expect quality — as do the broadcast outlets and online platforms that make content available. We are well aware of these pressures and that’s why we encourage you to bring us your challenges so our team can find the most efficient workflow for you.
Engineering solutions is one of our commitments to our clients and one of the values to which our team is dedicated.
The quality of our client’s programs is at the forefront of everything we do at Aberdeen. Adding CinnaFilm’s Tachyon product to our digital encoding workflows means higher-quality frame-rate conversions for those requiring international delivery or a 24P adaptation for broadcast. Currently, Aberdeen encodes and delivers thousands of standards-converted programs per month to over 400 broadcast outlets all over the world. This latest technology advancement allows Aberdeen to further increase the quality of the programs we distribute.
Before we move on, we should probably explain what exactly is meant by a standards conversion. The description is that the word standard can be more easily understood as frame rate. This frame rate conversion is the process of taking a video filmed at one frame rate, say 30 frames per second, and converting it to 25 or 24 frames per second.
Why would you want to do a frame rate conversion? Well, IMHO, no one really wants to do this sort of alteration as it takes away detail and cadence from the intended “look.” However, when delivering content to other countries for television broadcast, certain standards are in place. Standard, in this case, refers to the geographically imposed frame rate dictated by a country's power system and the conversion is the change of that frame rate to the new time base.
Before we made the clear decision to go with Tachyon, we had to explore what features/technology it utilizes to produce a higher quality conversion over the other leading software converters. Tachyon has the ability to synthesize new frames using motion compensation, along with special and temporal noise reduction, cadence error correction, and interlace re-scaling make up the majority of where the magic happens. The results of using Tachyon were an obvious increase in motion smoothness, image sharpness, and noise reduction in the Tachyon converted video over the other, more elementary, systems of software that typically use a method of cadenced frame blending.
Tachyon’s patented GPU-based algorithms are the broadcast industry’s highest-quality frame rate conversion software. When we first saw the side-by-side tests we could not wait to adopt and roll out such a quality-enhancing product for our clients and stations. We are extremely excited to implement this addition to our client’s workflows.
Today, in a partnership with Trinity Broadcasting Network, Hillsong Church has launched The Hillsong Channel. The 24-hour channel will feature Hillsong Church’s globally recognized worship performances, conferences, documentaries, children’s programming, talk shows, and messages from Christian leaders – including Hillsong Senior Pastor Brian Houston and his wife Bobbi Houston. Read
Aberdeen would like to extend our heartfelt praises to our client and trusted AberFast station partner, GEB America for being the recipient of the 2016 Full Power TV Station of the Year Award presented at the NRB Proclaim conference last month. The award was given as part of NRB’s Annual Media Awards program, which honors and celebrates excellence in production, service to the community, faithfulness to the mission, commitment to the Gospel, and personal integrity.
Television stations or advertising agencies will provide detailed instructions on their broadcast requirements for producers to follow before submitting their program. However, before exploring the technical specifications of the bit rate, codec, wrapper, GOP structure, etc. you’ll need to ensure you add your broadcast leader elements to your timeline. Although the broadcast requirement varies from station to station (sometimes absent), we have established a common layout of how the leader elements should be formatted.Read
Aberdeen Broadcast Services is honored to confidently proclaim that we have secured our position as a trusted and reliable vendor of captioning and digital file delivery throughout the #2 Designated Market Area in the United States, according to recent estimates by The Nielsen Company. Our AberFast Digital File Delivery is now in place to deliver broadcast-ready long-form programming to all of the major stations in the Los Angeles market including KCBS (CBS), KNBC (NBC), KTLA (CW), KABC (ABC), and KTTV (FOX).
To what do we attribute our success?
Station managers are able to free up the time of their engineers and traffic personnel from ingesting tapes or flipping individual client files flowing in from various producers. The content securely arrives at the station QC’d for broadcast in a custom play-server ready file codec/wrapper, approved file naming system, and properly embedded closed captions.
And for the producers? One single upload of the finished program to us and we’ll take it from there.
Local Television Designated Market Area Estimates
For producers of paid programming, it is essential to know your reach.
Los Angeles is the most populous city in the state of California, and the second-most populous in the U.S; after New York City. According to Forbes, Los Angeles is currently on pace to become the world’s third city with a trillion-dollar economy, following behind Tokyo and New York City. The average resident of L.A. has 20% more purchasing power than their counterparts in New York.
There are 5,523,800 Los Angeles TV homes, making up 4.85% of the entire US TV viewership. Here’s how the demographics breakdown and where LA ranks:
AberFast Station Partners in the Los Angeles Market Area
KABC-TV ABC & ABC Family
KCAL-TV Independent
KCBS-TV CBS
KCOP-TV MYTV
KDOC-TV Independent
KFTR-TV Univision
KJLA-TV LATV
KLCS-TV PBS SoCal
KMEX-TV Univision
KNBC-TV NBC
KOCE-TV PBS
KPXN-TV Ion Television
KTBN-TV Trinity Broadcast Network
KTLA-TV CW
KTTV-TV Fox
KVEA-TV Telemundo
KXLA-TV Independent
We are adding clients and stations on a regular basis all over the world. Please check out our FULL station map. It’s now close to 400 stations globally!
A recognizable anthem throughout Los Angeles, the song “I love LA” by Randy Newman is ringing in our ears. With over 18 million people in the greater Los Angeles market, there’s a lot to love. "We love it!"
