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While
in the eighth grade, Ken Brady remembers going to an Atlanta Braves baseball
game and seeing a TV truck parked beside the stadium. "It was long before all
the security you have now, and I literally walked into the truck," he says. One
of the operators started showing him how things worked. "I thought, 'You mean you can get paid for this?'"Â
recalls Brady.
Today, the facilities used to produce sports at Turner Broadcasting System
would bear little resemblance to the old analog, tape-based,
standard-definition truck that so enthralled Brady, in part because of some of
the innovative work done by Turner's senior VP of media technology and
operations.
For example, Brady's efforts on file-based workflows have played a major role
in Turner's efforts to go tapeless. In 2010 and 2011, Brady conceived and then
spearheaded the design and building of Turner Sports Center. That project,
which took Turner Sports tapeless and relied on a Dalet media asset management
system, was a finalist last September in the "content management"Â category of the IBC2012 Innovation Awards.
Currently, Brady is working on the even more ambitious project of abolishing
tapes from Turner's infrastructure. As part of that effort, "we will get off
tape completely inside our campus productions so that there will be no
videotape by the end of [2013],"Â he says. "In 2014, we will no longer use tape and no
longer receive tapes."Â
Brady brings extensive experience in technical operations and productions to
all these efforts. In high school, he worked for a local cable TV channel and
then attended the Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications,
where he did videography with a band while they were on tour and worked at a
local TV station. After school, he wanted to go into audio for theatrical film
production. But after discovering that it might take years to get established,
he switched gears and focused on TV.
"I was always the tech guy who enjoyed learning the ins and outs of particular
equipment," while being extremely
interested in the creative side of the business and music, he says. "Combining those two into a job led me more and
more down the path to TV."
Brady took a series of jobs at local TV stations and production houses,
including a company in Atlanta that did extensive work for Turner. Pleased with
his work, Turner hired him in 1995 as an editor, the first of seven different
positions he has held at the company.
Early on, Brady was part of the team involved in the innovative design and
construction of Turner Studios in 1998-99. "It was Turner's first big foray
into taking as much production in-house as possible, and I was in charge of
setting up the signal flow, connectivity and routing," he explains.
After that, Brady played a major role in the company's move to HD in 2003-04 and helped with the
company's push into digital distribution. He formed the
Digital Media Group, which later grew into the company's Systems Technology
Group for electronic sell-through, DVD and Blu-ray encoding services.
In addition to balancing a number of major projects, Brady has long found time
for technical groups and forums that help create industry-wide collaboration. "I
very much appreciate people's willingness to share information and their
experiences,†he
says. "The amount of aggregate knowledge and different
experiences that people have in this industry makes everyone's job easier, particularly when it comes to
technology and workflow."
