Dreamjob: The Starfish Story

Mark Shattuck, vice president of production and engineering at the Starfish Television Network, welcomes the challenge of keeping the channel's server programmed 24 hours a day with content showcasing nonprofits nationwide.

Mark Shattuck, vice president of production and engineering at the Starfish Television Network, welcomes the challenge of keeping the channel's server programmed 24 hours a day with content showcasing nonprofits nationwide.

Mark Shattuck enjoys his job. As the vice president of production and engineering at the Salt Lake City-based Starfish Television Network, the nation's first television network devoted to advancing the missions of nonprofit organizations, Shattuck is able to apply his technological expertise to a good cause.

“I asked myself, ‘What am I doing good for the world?’ I was so busy working that I never had a chance to give back,” says Shattuck, who was formerly affiliated with San Jose, Calif.-based Spotlight Video Productions, the company he co-founded 23 years ago. “Now I get paid to run a television network from a technical standpoint, which I love, and I also quite literally get to make a difference.”

Most of Starfish's content is existing video created by dozens of nonprofit organizations — including the Children's Miracle Network, the Humane Society, and Mothers Without Borders — although the network is becoming increasingly involved in collaborative productions. For example, Starfish recently produced a television show featuring the Hollywood-based Character and Morality in Entertainment (CAMIE) Awards presentation. “They win because they get exposure; we win because we get content,” says Shattuck, who also notes that Starfish may eventually be producing original programming such as a 30-minute news show featuring celebrity and other high-profile philanthropists.

Starfish has the capability to accept every format from ¾in. to DVD, but most material comes in as Betacam SP, Shattuck says. He and his team then transfer that content to DVCAM, Starfish's house format, and ingest it into their server. “It's a challenge to keep that server programmed with 24 hours of content; we don't take anything live,” he says.

Of course, Shattuck has his wish list. He and the network aim to have 100-percent redundancy (“If my high-powered amplifier goes down, I'm off the air,” he says), beefed-up edit suites to provide postproduction services for clients (Starfish currently has three Avid suites), and a fly pack for small events. But these are goals that the young network, itself a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) entity, will have to meet later on down the road. “We have a saying, ‘TYFN,’ which means ‘two years from now,’ because in two years, we'll be known and we'll be a different company,” Shattuck says.

The Starfish Television Network launched April 18 on Dish Network channel 9408. Its programming can also be streamed online at Virtual Digital Cable (www.vdc.com).

For more information about Starfish, visit www.starfishtv.org.