News

10/18/07

Status Update on ContentDepot Conversion

As anticipated, the final station adoption milestone in the ContentDepot transition was passed on October 1, 2007, with all 428 PRSS stations now confirmed as operational in the new environment. Since then, we have been proceeding with further activities to support and strengthen operation of the ContentDepot, and the dismantling of the legacy distribution system has been proceeding as planned.

On October 2, the PRSS commissioned a new fully-equipped backup Network Operations Center at Minnesota Public Radio in St. Paul. This facility can be deployed in the event of a situation that renders all or part of the primary Network Operations Center at NPR inoperable for some period of time. More information and new emergency procedures for stations and producers are available at http://www.prss.org/resources/bunoc.cfm.

The new backup NOC replaces the previous facility at WCVE-FM in Richmond, VA, which has been in place to provide limited emergency services for the PRSS since 2003. Our thanks to WCVE for providing this critical service for public radio for the past four years.

On October 10, the legacy PRSS standard channels were turned off, and stations are now receiving a new daily Operations Schedule that shows only the ContentDepot transmissions. The four NPR HD Radio channel services (Folk Alley, Groove Salad, Radio Ahora, and XpoNential Radio), as well as PRI's BBC Mundo, will remain on Comstream channels until later this year.

Another significant software release for the ContentDepot is scheduled for deployment later this month, and a subsequent release in 2008 will address requirements to "harden" various internal components of the system. Continuing consultation with stations and producers will help to identify and prioritize additional user-driven improvements to the ContentDepot, and to inform longer term strategies for interconnection services. We will continue to keep users advised of issues and developments affecting your distribution system.