TVO is an agency of the Ontario Ministry of Education and a not-for-profit registered charity that produces a wide range of digital educational content as well as being a renowned broadcaster of educational and current affairs content in Ontario.
As the technological extension of Ontario’s public education system, TVO’s vision is to create a better world through the power of learning. TVO provides learning opportunities for Ontarians through innovative educational products, in-depth current affairs, ground-breaking documentaries, and award-winning TVOKids resources both inside and outside the classroom. TVO is funded primarily by the Province of Ontario and is a registered charity supported by sponsors and thousands of donors.
We produce live children’s television throughout the day as well as a daily current affairs program ‘The Agenda with Steve Paikin’ from our on-site studio. We also shoot in the field including our ‘Ontario Hubs’ regional content.
We produce many digital educational products including mPower, a suite of online games focused on Maths and STEM and TVOKids.com, our children’s website that hosts many in-house produced games. We also produce 4 series of podcasts.
We deliver to a number of platforms including broadcast (via our master control partners Corus Entertainment); our websites and social media including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
In addition, we offer an on-line high-school service where students can study for and achieve their Ontario Secondary School Diploma (OSSD). We offer about 150 online courses via our Learning Management System (D2L BrightSpace). These courses are produced in-house by teams of Instructional Designers, Multimedia Specialists and Digital Designers.
To support these products, we have teams creating a range of content types including broadcast video, graphics and digital art, animations, and stills. We record in studio and have camera operators in the field. We have teams of graphic designers and digital artists producing illustrations.
To support the various content production workflows, currently, we have developed a suite of systems incorporating Commercial off the Shelf (COTS) systems and in-house built applications. Many of the COTS systems have been heavily customised.
At the centre of this eco-system is our Digital Asset Management (DAM) system which manages all of our program information in a hierarchical structure (Series > Program > Segment), and supports a number of business workflows including quality control, program acquisitions and more.
The main store for our digital essence is our archive management system MassTech MassStore, which manages our on-premises tape archive. We are not intending to replace this system so a new solution will need to be able to integrate with it seamlessly.
Workflow orchestration and transcoding is carried out by a number of systems, the main ones being TeleStream Vantage and MassStore. There is a good deal of functional overlap between the systems, which is one inefficiency we are trying to address in this initiative.
The current eco-system has not been re-designed for 13 years. It was designed at a time when broadcast was the overriding consideration and works within the technical limitations of the time. We are finding it difficult to adapt the system to new workflows and business requirements, much of it is built on customised or in-house built applications it is also quite manpower-heavy with respect to support.
We are leaving open the question as to whether we would be procuring one system, or a suite of systems.
