In broadcast television, “play out” doesn’t mean that you go outdoors for a game of baseball.
Play out is the term used for broadcasting a television program to a network so that they can deliver them to the audience. In order for play out to occur, the programs need to be broadcasted via play out servers to the networks. Thanks to the digital revolution in television, doing this is easier that it’s ever been before. The digital video simply needs to be edited on a broadcast
server and then transmitted to the play out server for broadcasting. Television has never had it better.

There are many different companies that manufacture play out servers that offer a variety of features, so it’s important to get one that suits particular needs. Just want to broadcast basic video? Then you can go with a basic play out server. But there are also models that include editing capabilities; a play out and broadcast server, all rolled into one. With a hybrid machine like this, you can edit and broadcast from the same box. Some models include playlist options, so that you can schedule your programming from the same server as well.

But most play out servers have a limited capacity, so most television stations will have a play out center that is dedicated to housing these servers and making sure that programming gets routed through the correct channels to make sure that it gets broadcasted correctly. It can be a little dicey, having to keep track of all the different programs that come through a play out server in a day, so it’s always good to have them all in one centralized location to be managed all together. It’s certainly easier this way than it used to be.

Back when television was recorded onto tapes, a broadcaster’s machine room was a complex mess of tapes operating with a wide variety of formats. But now that the television industry has gone digital, there are digital and analog tapes that have been reduced to archived … It’s much easier to manage television programming digitally and it shows in the quality of television these days. It’s hard to believe that all of those tapes and all of that equipment have now been streamlined into one play out server. Broadcast television is becoming and will continue to be more and more efficient with the foundation and migration to servers.