In Broadcast - December 2017 - 46

46

www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 7 - Issue 12 | December 2017

InMedia

TV Newsrooms
Contributing Editor Andy Stout inspects the news systems and
technology trends that are helping to present accurate
and timely broadcast news...

P

ick a day, any day, and examine
its news coverage and you can see
in a snapshot how much the business
of television news has changed in the
past few years. From user-generated
inputs, Presidential Twitter accounts,
and social sentiment monitoring, to
24/7 multi-platform, multi-purposed
outputs, the news story of the 2018
era appears in more formats, on more
platforms, and has a longer lifespan
than ever before.
As a result, vendors are having to
create systems that can seamlessly
handle content that would have been
well outside the broadcast purview
only a few years ago, whether that be
non-standard file formats or unusual
aspect ratios. Content destined for an
evening news broadcast might still
follow a 'traditional' workflow - an
edited package a couple of minutes
in length, maybe with voiceover and
additional graphics. That same content
might then appear on a social media
channel shorn of the VO, edited to a
different length to increase the initial
impact, and with non-transcriptive
subtitles that take up a far greater
proportion of screen real estate than
ever before.
Social Evolution
Social media is an increasing driver
in the news space. As the Reuters
Institute Digital News Report put it
last year, this might be a golden age
of television but it's not a golden age
of television news. "Overall viewership
of some television news programmes
is now declining about as fast as the
readership of print newspapers,"
it notes, pointing to a widespread,
multinational pattern of decline,
before concluding that the challenge
lies in reinventing its core social and
political mission in a new environment
and finding ways of resourcing it.

SI Media's Web proxy editor interface

SAM's VIBE can squirt content to its Go! cut-down NLE or the fully featured Rio

That challenge in turn is one of the
driving forces behind new software
like SAM's VIBE which launched
earlier in the year at NAB. Based on
both standard IT storage and the sQ
server technology initially developed
by Quantel, one of its key components
is Go!, a browser-based timeline editor
that itself started life as a simple
remote search engine. This can either
publish directly to social media itself
or tie in to SAM's Rio craft editor for
higher end production, allowing a
news organisation both to be first to
break stories with what SAM refers
to as 'the bare minimum of editing/
creative input' on the one hand, and
leading with the same content polished
for flagship broadcast later in the day.
And this hints at its modular system
that can scale effectively, and links to
Newsroom Computer Systems (NCRS)
via MOS gateway.
For the leading NCRS systems
themselves, the changes in the
newsroom dynamic have seen them
forced into perhaps a speedier
evolution of their systems than has
been entirely comfortable. Yet so far
they are rising to the challenge and
managing to successfully adapt, taking
their customers - and Octopus, for
instance, has over 220 customers
and more than 50 MOS
partners - along with
them.
Octopus is, in fact, a
good example all round.
Octopus 8 is now over
two years old, but it has a
topic-centric approach to
news which dovetails in
with the cross-platform,

cross-cutting nature of the current
newsroom. Content is essentially kept
within virtual containers that store
all the material needed to create a
finished news piece. The news team is
then able to quickly assemble content
for
different
channels from this
kit of aggregated
parts,
using
different platformspecific elements
as they see fit.
The Prague-based
company has also
put a lot of development R&D into
its Social Media Hub, which not only
includes a range of publication tools
- from direct to platforms and also
via CMS such as Joomla, WordPress
and Durpal for web work - but also
the ability to monitor social media
platforms from within the Octopus 8
UI.
Activity in the social sector is
understandably high as organisations
chase the viewers Reuters says are
migrating there. Vizrt's Social TV
solution 1.5 has added the ability to
extract Facebook reactions from posts
and can now synchronise messages
between feeds and ticker carousels.
Its DataHub also now acts as an
external Update Service end-point,
meaning that graphics taken on air
automatically can be updated with the
latest data from the social feed.
Flexible Solutions
Indeed, Vizrt is one of the
companies actively agitating for a
move away from the NCRS, arguing
that broadcasters need more flexible

solutions and that a single journalist
can drive the entire production of
a live news show. Its Showmaker
rundown creator is a case in point,
allowing news teams to create
rundowns for linear newscasts,
including automated commands to
playback video clips, graphics and
other elements, which can then be
executed in turn by the company's
Mosart studio automation or Opus
control room software.
At IBC2017, Dalet (currently
celebrating a major contract win to
kit out BBC Wales's new media facility
with an enterprise Dalet Galaxy MAM
and Orchestration platform) unveiled
a new Social Media Panel which has
been designed to enable what it refers
to as a true 360-degree workflow
encompassing
content
curation
and publishing, research and trend
analysis. In terms of functionality it
appears up there with some of the
leading standalone social monitoring
platforms such as Hootsuite or Sprout,
but with additional deep hooks into
Dalet OneCut for editing including
a drag and drop UI, and Dalet Cube
for those crucial open captioned
autoplayed videos.

Fast insight: Vizrt's Social TV analytics
provides key social metrics

Beyond Social
SI Media used IBC to also improve
social media integration with its
NCRS suite, as well as adding studio
automation tools to control an
impressive range of devices involved
in studio management, including
master control, mixers, lights, camera
robotics, lenses, virtual sets, graphics
systems and more. For those outside
of the studio, the company will
launch a Web Proxy Editor at NAB
that includes all the features already
present in the company's Windows
application and gives remote workers
access to a range of tools including
voiceover recording with audio track
mapping and level management;
video/audio effects such as overlay,
fades, crossfades, and wipes; graphics/
watermarks; blur/pixellate and more.
Masstech Innovations, the newly
minted company formed when
Masstech and SGL merged earlier
this year, is in the first generation of
merging its product lines as well.
http://www.inbroadcast.com https://s-a-m.com/products/sam-vibe-news-production/c-24/p-351 http://www.vizrt.com/solutions/social-tv-solution/ https://youtu.be/wxHQ7grDYjw
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of In Broadcast - December 2017
