Customer Focus: Gospel Broadcasting Network (GBN)

The Challenge

The Gospel Broadcasting Network (GBN), an American Christian satellite broadcast network, had reached a point where it become necessary for the station to move away from its existing in-house system processes and implement a fully integrated broadcast management solution that could provide complete control over its produced and acquired content. The new system would also be tasked to play an instrumental role in helping the network create new opportunities to connect with their audience and increase viewership.

Gaining Universal Control of Back-Office Operations

GBN found the solution they were searching for with ProTrack, the industry-leading broadcast management system developed by Myers. ProTrack was selected by GBN for its ability to offer a centralized system for metadata, scheduling and traffic. In addition, with ProTrack, GBN could finally automate numerous tasks that were manual and repetitive in nature, allowing them to shift valuable human resources towards content creation and audience engagement strategies.

“What ProTrack has essentially done is provide GBN with a higher level of visibility into our operations,” said Mark Teske, Director of Operations and Programming at GBN. “Our station had reached a point where we needed to adopt a more unified environment for accessing, managing, and scheduling content. In ProTrack, we now have a proven and scalable solution – one that can take our operation to the next level today – but also provide us with a foundation on which we can grow moving forward.”

Simplifying Through Seamless Integration

“What also made ProTrack the right choice for GBN, was the fact that it had the ability to fully integrate with our network’s existing Florical Automation System,” explained Teske. “This helps unify our workflow by providing a comprehensive broadcast log containing both primary and secondary events to automation for playout.”

In turn, Florical will return an As-run file to ProTrack for schedule reconciliation purposes. Also, GBN can now leverage ProTrack’s broadcast management tools to further automate additional tasks. For example, by using ProTrack’s program template schedule and spot auto-insertion rules, GBN is now able to streamline populating their program schedules and breaks. In addition, ProTrack will provide an automated media listings export to Rovi and Gracenote.

Providing Viewers With Accurate & Timely Schedule Information

In addition to streamlining their schedule process, GBN was also looking for a seamless means to provide more up-to-date program content to their audience. This made the ProWeb Add-On Module the prefect solution for producing and delivering accurate and interactive program schedules to the network’s Web site – ultimately making it easier for GBN viewers to engage with program networking.