In the Press: February 15, 2005
Broadcast Dialogue magazine, February 2005.
Article by Daphne Lavers (Reprinted with permission.)
 February 15, 2005 / Toronto, CANADA - When Carol Darling finished university, she graduated with a degree in civil engineering complete with the Professional Engineer (P. Eng.) designation, a degree still not all that common for women. And for her first job, the Ottawa native landed a position with Bell Canada as a manager in plant construction for the telephone company.
Carol Darling doesn’t seem to be the type to kick over the traces that delineated traditional career choices for women; it’s far more likely that she was never so harnessed to begin with.
Carol Darling has moved through the telephone, telecommunications and television industries, designing, building and operating communications systems ranging from underground telecom to broadcast television. Along the way, she’s dealt with, belonged to, and in many cases run, the leading broadcast technical organizations and committees including the full alphabet soup of ABSOC, CDTV, ACATS, ATSC, and CRC. (More on these later!) And the basic creativity inherent in much of the core work of engineering has begun to emerge into exploration of the graphic arts – specifically, painting and watercolours – in off-duty time, of course!
In 2004, Darling was appointed executive director of the North American Broadcasters Association. For her – and for those few Canadian companies that belong to the organization – NABA expands perspectives and horizons beyond our borders.
“...it’s not just about our little business in Canada,” she said. “It’s about what’s happening in the world relating to product development, service development and world issues that affect all these things. At the core of the work is how do we understand how the future is unfolding, protect our businesses, move businesses in the right direction to continue to be viable – and provide a valuable and good service for viewers around the world.”
As broadcasting has evolved in many respects into a national and a global business, the responsibilities of NABA have also evolved. As executive director, Darling oversees the day-to-day operations of the organization, formed in the early 1970s. NABA is an association of broadcast networks from Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, representing traditional private and public networks, direct-to-home providers, specialty and cable networks, national broadcast associations, telecommunications operators, and, in a continued evolution, new media.
All the major U.S. networks, two major Mexican networks and Canada’s CBC hold full membership and form the NABA Board of Directors. Associate members include satellite operators Bell ExpressVu, DirecTV and Sirius Satellite Radio, the Canadian and American broadcaster associations (CAB, NAB) and software giant Microsoft. Affiliate members include a host of service providers and vendors ranging from Dolby Labs to Intelsat, from Panasonic to Telesat Canada, and from Loral Skynet to Sony.
Darling works with NABA Secretary General Michael McEwen, former long-time CBC executive and long-time head of the Canadian CDTV (Canadian Digital Television Inc.) consortium, and with NABA President Peter Smith, vice president of Advanced Technology for NBC.
The global connections don’t end there. NABA also acts as Secretariat to the World Broadcasting Unions, of which McEwen is head.
All of which means that Carol Darling has her work cut out for her overseeing NABA’s four primary committees – technical, news and operations, legal, and integrated media – as well as overseeing the operations of the WBU.
Launch of a Television Executive
“I always liked to build things and make things that you can see and feel and touch,” Darling said, which contributed to her university choice of civil engineering. Right out of university, with her P. Eng. designation, she went to work for Bell Canada as a manager in plant construction.
“It was a really satisfying job to start with right out of school because it had autonomy,” she said, “and responsibility for projects with outside contractors, and when things went wrong you could fix them… That thrust me into an environment that was traditionally male-based, and I think probably made me rise to the occasion.”
As an engineer, Darling was to move in male-dominated fields for much of her professional career. With Bell Canada’s focus on managerial training, Darling moved further into telephone plant construction as a supervisor in conduit and manhole projects, a work experience she enjoyed immensely. It was outside work in which she designed the projects, commissioned and oversaw the construction.
“I’ve said that I liked to start at the bottom – which was underground!” she said, with her characteristic low-key sense of humour.
The next logical step was into telecommunications, specifically design and construction of telecom plant “so I spent my fair share of time in wet, dripping manholes!”
In Bell Canada’s Engineering and Economics department, Darling oversaw and prepared filings for regulatory approval by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), among the most intensive and comprehensive areas the Commission oversees. Applications included proposals for traditional copper cable, satellite services, carriage of broadcast services and cable television systems, which also provided the opportunity for exploring and designing cable plant.
After a number of years with Bell Canada, Darling ended up as project manager for business development. And other opportunities began to appear.
Tongue in cheek, she describes the process of moving on from Bell. “I was keen and anxious to take on the world at a young age and it was going to take me a long time to become vice president of Bell Canada!” she said. “An opportunity came along to work in business management consulting, drawing on the expertise that I’d learned in the telecommunications and broadcasting environments.”
The opportunity was with Nordicity, well-known Ottawa-based consulting firm that works extensively in broadcasting, an opportunity that expanded her increasing expertise in the business side of communications. Projects included new business consultation, and new broadcasting and telecom applications which involved even more business analysis and financial expertise.
Advanced Television and the Launch of WTN
It was at this point that Carol Darling started to become immersed in advanced broadcast technologies. As an engineer who cut her teeth on telecommunications, Darling was an excellent choice to start and head up the new Advanced Broadcast Systems of Canada organization (ABSOC), an industry consortium formed to look at new television systems.
“The mission (of ABSOC) really was to get the Canadian television industry up to speed related to the transition to new television technologies,” she said. “We thought we were going to be dealing with high definition television which at that time was analog, and in fact the whole digital transmission revolution came along. It turned out that our focus became educating ourselves about digital video compression (DVC). We were very much involved in the industry’s implementation of that and learning about it, and in fact Canadian services implemented DVC before U.S. services.”
Starting part-time as director of research and committee operations, she became program director in 1992 and then chair of ABSOC in 1995.
In the meantime, Darling had moved to Winnipeg to help launch a new television channel, WTN – Women’s Television Network – in 1994, as vice president, engineering and operations.
“We had a great run with (WTN),” she said. “It was a once in a lifetime kind of experience. We had the opportunity to build the business in an area we were passionate about. That doesn’t happen all that often!”
It was a fascinating time to launch a new television service. Digital television was still on the horizon and high definition remained a gleam in the eye for most television producers. WTN launched with the core of its video plant in digital, using a router that could switch between digital and analog. WTN became part of a shared satellite uplink facility in Winnipeg, a challenge in itself, and eventually located a StarChoice uplink facility right in the WTN building.
And WTN was itself something of a radical concept.
“We were ahead of a whole movement for the advertising industry to start marketing to women,” Darling said. “It has almost become the norm now to recognize women as a key audience to target.”
With engineering and operations as her initial focus, Darling subsequently picked up responsibility for affiliate relations and then, responsibility for business development.
The Alphabet Groups
Darling maintained her work and involvement with ABSOC at the same time that she was helping launch WTN, and throughout the 1990s. Her involvement with the alphabet committees and organizations began to increase.
She was invited by a former U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman to join a task force on advanced television as the Canadian industry representative. ACATS was the FCC Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Service. She co-chaired the ABSOC Joint Technical Committee, chaired the ABSOC Advanced Television Implementation Task Group, was on the executive committee of the U.S. Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC), and was a member of the federal Heritage Canada Task Forces on both the Implementation of Digital Television, and Implementation of Digital Radio. With the latter group, she was a member of the technical working group. In the same year that WTN launched, 1994, she also joined the Board of the Canadian Satellite Users Association, and subsequently CSUA’s executive committee.
In 1998, she took over the chairmanship of the CDTV (Canadian Digital Television, an industry consortium) technology working group. In 2000, she joined the CDTV Board, and in the same year, she joined the Board of the federal Communications Research Centre (CRC), on-going activities she continues to maintain.
The WTN Finale
In 2002, with 40 to 45 staff members and six million subscribers, WTN was sold for $205 million to Corus Entertainment. Corus changed the name to W and the programming orientation towards commercial network prime-time.
WTN had just built a new facility, which remains empty.
And Carol Darling left Winnipeg, a city she had enjoyed immensely because of the excitement and challenges of starting and running a national network and because of the qualities of the city. A life well-balanced between work time and personal time was possible because of easy five-minute commutes, a manageable cost-of-living, easy parking, a strong and active cultural community, and endless summer days where the sun sets so late in the evening that every day after work feels like a mini-vacation.
“It was really hard to let go because we had a vision of where we wanted to take it to and we weren’t there yet,” she said. “It makes me really sad, I loved it there… Adapting to Toronto has been much harder than adapting to living in Winnipeg. It was a great run, a wonderful experience and I learned a lot, in terms of my own growth.”
Taking a couple of years off – more or less – following the purchase of WTN, Darling moved into broadcast consulting on a range of projects including consumer HDTV marketing and education, satellite space segment proposals, and master control automation. She also created several paintings in acrylics and watercolours, continuing the creative bent which began with sketching buildings and telecom plant for Bell Canada.
In April, 2004, she became executive director of NABA. And from her initial career activities working underground in telecommunications conduit, she moved onto the world stage, involved with global organizations and initiatives such as the WIPO treaty (World Intellectual Property Organization), the WBU (World Broadcast Union), and a host of ITU (International Telecommunications Union) issues and programs.
 Protection
Moving towards the end of her first year as NABA’s Executive Director, it seems that a number of issues and initiatives that Darling is confronting focus on various incarnations and implementations of protection. That’s perhaps not surprising considering heightened global insecurities on a number of fronts.
At NABA, protection issues arise relating to the safety and security of broadcasters and broadcasting; the safety of journalists in practice; the safety and security of broadcasting signals in terms of both frequency interference and intellectual property and copyright protection. It’s a theme running across a host of activities in the post 9/11 world.
In late 2004, NABA’s board approved investigation of a possible new committee on safety and security in broadcasting. The proposal is currently in the exploratory stages: it may look at developing practices and guidelines for the North American broadcasting community focussed on disaster planning for broadcast facilities and on staff safety; and could also examine the processes and procedures of getting critical messages to the public in the event of an emergency.
South of the border, the FCC and Homeland Security started an organization entitled the Media Securities and Reliability Council (MSRC) – pronounced MISRICK. The launch of that organization had much to do with the broadcasting facilities destroyed and broadcasting staff who lost their lives in the Sept. 11, 2001 destruction of the World Trade Centre, and the host of broadcast facilities and transmitters the towers supported.
The proposed NABA effort would complement and expand on the activities of MSRC, with, of course, a continental focus. Both natural and man-made disasters impact broadcasting from the north pole to the equator. The power black-out in 2003 in the eastern half of the continent, security arrangements for the Olympics and the impact on broadcast crews, natural disasters such as earthquakes in Mexico, and to some degree the SARS outbreak in Canada, all pointed to the need for much better disaster liaison and co-ordination.
Safety of Journalists
Another thread of the protection tapestry at NABA is the protection of journalists on a global basis. NABA is part of the co-ordinating committee of world press freedom organizations – the only broadcasting organization involved with this primarily print journalism group.
“If you believe that the public has the right to hear the story and journalists are the people to get you the story, how can the community provide them better protection?” asked Darling. “Right now in Iraq, journalists can’t move without an entourage of 12 security guys around them because some of the terrorist groups are targeting journalists. The safety of journalists is a hugely important issue for all broadcasters and this is certainly an issue being discussed by the Secretaries General of the WBU to see if there’s an opportunity to make input to the UN to raise the profile of this safety issue.”
The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) was convened in Geneva in 2003; the next meeting is planned for Tunisia in 2005. The World Press Freedom Committee, to which NABA belongs, presented a declaration calling for adoption of an essential principle – “freedom of expression (which includes) access to information, maximum dissemination of information and the freedom of the news media” according to the WSIS Web site. The declaration deals specifically with press freedoms, and more significantly, the rights of a free press which the committee states includes editorial independence, protection of sources, access to information, freedom to publish and freedom of movement, to name only a few.
Protection of Broadcast Rights
Also on the international front, NABA sent delegates to the November, 2004 WIPO conference which focussed on “development of a treaty to update intellectual property standards for broadcasters in the digital age”, according to a WIPO press release.
“The old treaty of 1961 – it was a different world then,” said Darling. “Technology has changed, the environment has changed, businesses have changed, so much of it just doesn’t provide the legal tools anymore to protect broadcasters’ signals in the years ahead. This is seen as a fundamental concern to the broadcasting community – it’s signal protection. One of the differences in this treaty vs. 1961 is to give broadcasters the ability to be able to control their signals beyond their borders. The basic premise for all of this content protection stuff is the average person does not have a right to distribute content that doesn’t belong to them.”
Broadcasters world-wide continue to operate under the 1961 Rome Convention on the Protection of Performers, Producers of Phonograms and Broadcasting Organizations. The goal of the November, 2004 meeting was nothing less than creating a new broadcasting treaty to deal with intellectual property rights in the information age. Discussions on the new treaty include such contentious issues as the scope and duration of copyright and whether that should be 20 years to 50 years of protection; whether and how protection should extend to webcasters; exceptions and limitations to rights for the purposes of education, libraries and disabled persons.
“The hope is that we can be ahead of the game enough to ensure that the Napsterization of the television business doesn’t happen,” said Darling. “Internet capacity and the growth of computing device capabilities to deal with advanced compression are advancing at such a pace that the industry has to be ready to deal with protection of content. And it’s more of an issue now because we’re starting to spit out really high-quality content into the consumer household, like HD.”
Content Protection
“The challenge is to get administrations … and broadcasters in all regions of the world to protect content when it needs to be protected,” Darling said. One of NABA’s first projects, she described, was a committee that put together a presentation on what in Canada, and elsewhere, is called Redistribution Control Signalling – the “broadcast flag” developed by the U.S. is only one incarnation of this process.
The broadcast flag, primarily an on-off signal, triggers protection systems in consumer devices that can initiate a variety of actions such as determining the number of copies that can be made, eliminating content transmission over an Internet-connected device, or encrypting an entire program or signal.
With new-release, in-theatre movies pirated and available on the Internet virtually within days of release, the driving force may originate with Hollywood studios, but it is broadcasters who need to put in place some of the protection mechanisms.
“The message NABA will be bringing over the next months to come is that a method to protect broadcast signals is absolutely critical to protecting content,” Darling said.
Technical Protection
One of the most critical issues facing broadcasters, particularly in North America but rapidly becoming a global concern, is electronic interference with broadcast signals.
As more and more electronic devices and services are developed, it was only a matter of time before some of those services and devices began to impinge on broadcast signals. Digital television, expanded satellite capacity and frequencies, digital and satellite radio, cellular telephones, and now wireless systems city-blocks or miles in dimension are filling up the frequency spectrum. The newest devices still on the drawing boards utilize ultra-wide-band (UWB) frequencies and sometimes frequency-hopping.
Typically, government administrations deal with interference concerns on a national basis or, at the ITU, on a global basis. But NABA is involved with the UWB issue now.
“The reason why we got into UWB is because the FCC is authorizing sales and operations of UWB systems on a licence-exempt basis,” she said. “The restrictions they’ve put on those licenses in terms of frequency protection, the broadcasting community feels are not adequate. They’ve gone ahead and done this, so the huge consumer electronics industry is seeing this as great potential and are moving forward to develop chips and products that will hit the marketplace. Meanwhile, research that’s been done with simulations indicates there could be a potential interference problem both in C-band and with some of the radio bands.
“The concern is that once a lot of these devices are in a particular area, they could really toast an incoming or outgoing C-band satellite signal or satellite radio,” Darling said. “In Canada, our L-band terrestrial radio falls into those frequencies as well.”
For broadcasters, perhaps particularly Canadian broadcasters, the movements of the American industry could have destructive potential.
Protection of Content Production
In addition to Darling’s responsibilities at NABA, she continues to chair the Canadian Digital Television consortium’s technology networking group. Even in that activity, the protection theme is running through its work on guidelines for aspect ratios and production formats.
“In terms of the Canadian industry, the issue of feeding the system with content that’s going to stand the test of time is really important,” she noted. “Some of the networks are starting to get into high definition but there’s an opportunity to not just get into high definition, when HD isn’t possible, to at least commission product in wide screen and to move the product along… In any product that you want to sell on the international market, if it’s not widescreen it’s not going to cut it. If it’s not HD, you will limit yourself in some markets. The days of four-by-three (television images) are over and the fact that we’re continuing to feed our system with that kind of (product) – it will have no shelf life.”
Engineering and Art
While only Canada’s national broadcaster, CBC, is a full member of NABA, the organization’s annual general conference next May will provide other Canadian broadcast networks with the chance to catch up with their international colleagues. For the first time, NABA’s annual conference will be held in Canada, in downtown Toronto. With sessions on such high profile issues as HD best practices, HD news, journalistic freedom and digital radio, to name only a few, it’s a golden opportunity for Canadian networks.
And to Carol Darling, those in the Canadian industry bring a unique perspective to the global broadcasting community. While the country is big, the market – and the broadcasting community – is small.
“To have a business that survives – with the size of our market – we have to understand the big picture,” she said. “As an industry, we typically have to understand how the pieces all fit together. Coming from a small place like Canada, we can bring a big perspective to things.”
While Carol Darling, P. Eng., is bringing her own unique telecom and network operations experience as well as high-level management and team-leading capabilities to the North American Broadcasters Association, she is also utilizing a different kind of perspective in the creation of her own artwork.
“A lot of my drawing has engineering roots, because I think in terms of scale,” she said. “I think a lot of people in the engineering field are extremely creative people. When you’re working with solving problems all the time, you need a certain amount of creativity to find new solutions for those problems… you have to be able to step back outside the box and make links from a number of areas in order to solve your problems.”
For Carol Darling, the links are now global, and the box has expanded to world-scale.
Senior writer Daphne Lavers is a Toronto-based freelancer. She may be reached by e-mail at dlavers@passport.ca.
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