With so many new venues becoming mainstream, Bill Harris and his team work hard to successfully juggle this network’s priorities.

Bill Harris is a little embarrassed to admit it, but he’s old enough to remember when editing film actually meant splicing together lengths of film. But like the medium itself, his industry is no longer so linear.

Bill Harris

Although his main job is still to prepare and broadcast the network’s programming, Harris said, his attention is increasingly drawn to ventures that repackage core television content from the AETN family (including A&E Network, The History Channel, The Biography Channel, History International, Military History Channel, The History Channel en español, Crime & Investigation Network, and A&E HD) for alternative consumption.

“The business is fractioned into smaller and smaller perspectives,” he said. “There will be a time when everyone will have their own channel—or their own blog. It’s difficult to make a rational business model out of that, but you can’t dismiss it, particularly if you can find a viable way to do it.”

From DVDs to PDAs
These days, the scope of AETN’s operations include just about any venue that consumes media content: video on demand, broadband applications, DVDs and Web sites, cell phone video streaming, and PDA downloads. More and more, the network is discovering education outlets for its productions, such as site installations at the Smithsonian Institution. Potential growth areas include GPS-enabled technology, which might enable a visitor of, say, the Gettysburg National Military Park, to download relevant historical information on a Blackberry while walking around the battlefield.

“Years ago, the thought of creating content to stream down to a cell phone was pretty out there,” Harris said. “Now it’s right in the middle of our strategic business goals.”

That sort of technological potential compels Harris and his team to manage more efficiently to deliver programming content to an ever-widening distribution venue base. Harris’ role in that process is monkey-in-the-middle, he said. “You have to throw a flag up when you think it’s too far-ranging, misaligned, or unsupportable,” he said. But when the latest ideas seem to have legs, it’s his job to find ways to align them in a productive way, rather than at odds with other aspects of the business.

The challenge is to always think ahead, Harris said. “You’ve got to look down the road, make sense of where you’re headed, and hope that you’re getting somewhere. But the road never ends, and you keep going faster and faster, so you have to develop sharper driving skills as you go.”

A curve in the road
The latest curve in the road, he said, came from updating the network’s technological infrastructure. AETN was launched at the birth of the digital age, so its editing functions were already done in digital format. It is now completing installation of an enterprise digital asset management platform, which enables operators to track all of the pieces of production along with a program file.

Especially as technology creates opportunities, Harris sees his job increasingly in terms of setting goals and aligning resources. More likely to spend his time these days poring over spreadsheets than over scripts and rough cuts, he said he works hard to respect the skills and collaborate with the people who know how to get their jobs done. “I help them understand our objectives, and then I get out the way.”

AETN has the history, so to speak, to stay competitive in a challenging industry, Harris said. “For more than 20 years, we’ve been fortunate to be successful in our business model, able to provide great programming content, excellent service, and value to our customers and business partners.”

But the effort, Harris is fond of saying, can be akin to retooling, in flight, a plane that never lands. “We produce content and push it out in a very exacting way, 24/7,” he said. “Sometimes you have to tell everyone to sit down and buckle up, and there will be no peanuts today, as you rebuild the plane bolt by bolt. At the same time, you’re looking for ways to improve the service, watching out for other air traffic, and doing weather checks. And occasionally dealing with an unruly passenger in the back.”

Deborah Geering, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , is a freelance writer based in Atlanta.