TV Guide dumps mainframe for flexible network

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, April, 1990 by Margaret Hunter

Radnor, Pa.-TV Guide recently signed a contract worth $5-$7 million to upgrade its current production system. it's buying software and hardware from a company that has never before worked with a commercial publisher.

Why so much money to a vendor with so little experience? The answer is that TV Guide is put together unlike any other magazine. With 107 regional editions and 16,000 to 23,000 unique pages produced each week, it has to be.

While the editorial section is produced similarly to those of other magazines, the listings section is a massive database more akin to the Yellow Pages than Time magazine. And despite the enormous proportions of the task, TV Guide doesn't have a traditional layout staff for the listings section at any of its nine regional production centers, or at headquarters in Radnor, Pennsylvania. most of the work is done automatically, by computer.

Editorial pages are written, edited and laid out using a BestInfo Wave4 system installed last october; traditionally produced color separations are stripped in, as with a "normal" magazine. The listings section, on the other hand, is compiled, paginated and laid out with little human intervention by a Univac 1100, an 18-year-old mainframe that staffers joke should be donated to the Smithsonian after it is replaced later this year with a series of large-memory servers manufactured by the Intergraph Corporation, a Huntsville, Alabama-based developer of interactive graphic systems. Intergraph was the surprise winner for the TV Guide contract, after a bidding process that included such well-known giants as IBM, DEC and Unisys.

To understand why the company won the contract, one must go back to the time just following the 1988 acquisition of TV Guide's owner, Triangle Publications, by Murdoch Magazines.

The new owner quickly discovered that making planned design changes would require an inordinate amount of time and effort. For example, it could take up to two weeks to move a feature from one part of the magazine to another, or even to move a page number four points to the left, according to Tom Greendyk, the title's director of systems development. Why? To change the position of a page number on 23,000 pages, an in-house programmer has to rewrite the Fortran coding inside the Univac that determines all page coordinates. Another example of the old system's cumbersome nature: Regionally produced edit and ad information is now modemed into headquarters and transferred into the Univac via magnetic tape; operators, during a rushed period, may take as long as a day to do so. A printout is faxed-or sometimes even mailed-back to the regional office for proofing. Thus, it can take two working days or longer to discover a simple typo.

New system relies on `distributed architecture'

The new system will change all that. it will depend on a series of large computers, not one mammoth mainframe. This "distributed architecture" was important to TV Guide's purchasing strategy, says Greendyk, because it will allow the network to be expanded easily in the future. Intergraph was the vendor offering the most attractive network of the type.

The new system will be directly interactive with local editors. For example, editors will be able to hyphenate and justify (H&J) a file within seconds, using one of the 12 InterServe servers to be installed at the regional production centers. Since final storage and retrieval will take place at headquarters, the integrity of the database will be maintained.

With the servers will come 46 interPro workstations and 35 special workstations with unique, 27 [inch] color monitors that will let editors see two or more full-page spreads at a time. Editors will even be able to see an entire issue's worth of spreads at one time to review ad placement.

Just as important as the hardware are the three major software programs TV Guide is buying from Intergraph: DP Manager, a publicly available database management program; Edition Builder (proprietary to 7 V Guide), which will automatically compile lists of edit and ad elements for inclusion in each edition; and DP Intelligent Layout Publisher, a new intergraph product that uses artificial intelligence to retrieve text from the database and automatically produce fully laid-out pages. TV Guide editors will be able to check the computer's handiwork on their 27 [inch] monitors. If an error is discovered, a file will be able to be retrieved, corrected,. H&Jed and returned to the mainframe in headquarters without third-party help or interference.

A major challenge slowing installation is the conversion of 7-V Guide's existing database, with more than two gigabytes of data, to SGML-coded text. once completed, this large, one-time housekeeping chore will allow the magazine to change platforms or software if it wishes to. Conversion may take much of 1990 to accomplish, according to Greendyk.

Installation of the hardware will begin this summer and continue for a year, says Lani Hajagos, Intergraph's product planning manager. "We're talk ing about one of the largest publications in the country, perhaps the world, and we're replacing the backbone of the organization," says Greendyk. "It's quite an undertaking." And although intergraph had never worked with a commercial publisher, it has many technical publishing clients: "They had a better grasp of our needs from the start," says Greendyk.