The unions will bring together notable labor and civil rights leaders, including AFL-CIO President Elizabeth H. Shuler, SAG-AFTRA National Executive Director & Chief Negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, AFT President Randi Weingarten, and President & CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights Maya Wiley to address a critical gap in evolving technology and workers’ interests. The summit will highlight the importance of including workers in shaping the future of technology and innovation.

Select leaders will be available for interviews in person or by phone. A full list of attendees is available here.

The summit will take place at Horseshoe Las Vegas, 3645 Las Vegas Blvd. South, Las Vegas.

Media can attend the first day of the summit, Tuesday, Jan. 9, in person or virtually by RSVPing here.

The following panels will be presented at local Pacific time:

1–2 p.m.: Opening session and discussion: Worker Rights in the Age of Tech
2–2:45 p.m.: AI Goes to Hollywood 2024
2:45–3:30 p.m.: Workers Winning in the Age of Tech
3:45–4:30 p.m.: Technology in the Face of Worker and Civil Rights
4:30–4:15 p.m.: AI and Democracy
5:15–5:45 p.m.: When Workers Fight, We Win!
5:45 p.m.: Closing remarks with SAG-AFTRA National Executive Director and Chief Negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland

The summit was co-founded by the AFL-CIO, the AFL-CIO Technology Institute and SAG-AFTRA and sponsored this year by AFGE, AFSCME, the American Federation of Teachers, the Air Line Pilots Association, the Amalgamated Transit Union, the Theatrical Stage Employees, National Nurses United, the Transportation Trades Department, the Transport Workers Union, the United Association of Union Plumbers and Pipefitters and Unite Here.

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The announcement comes just ahead of the annual CES in Las Vegas, where the ADTH receiver will be on display at the Advanced Television Systems Committee exhibit booth (Central Hall 19744.)

Ivy Shou, ADTH president, says: “The ADTH receiver is not only the industry’s first receiver certified to utilize the NextGen TV mark from the Consumer Technology Association, it’s also verified for content security and is the most affordable option in the market.  We’re delighted to expand availability of the ADTH receiver beyond the ADTH website to now include Walmart.com, which offers the new product for just $89.99 with free shipping available.”

Developed to meet the specifications of broadcasters who are upgrading to NextGen TV powered by ATSC 3.0, ADTH says the receiver is the first to meet the rigorous requirements of the electronics industry’s self-certification program.

Since its initial introduction a few months ago, continuous software improvements have enhanced the device’s utility and ease of use. With an internet connection, the ADTH receiver purchased today can benefit from continuous improvements — including recent enhancements spurred by user suggestions. The device’s on-screen display now includes a number pad to make it easier to tune to specific channels, and a bookmarking function has been added to save favorite channels.

ADTH is implementing a recording function (now available in “beta” mode), to enhance usability of the receiver. Other recent updates have sped up channel changing, improved the electronic program guide, and addressed market-specific issues reported by broadcasters. Future updates will allow users to add specific channels, improve reception sensitivity, and to personalize closed-captioning settings.

Built to bring the benefits of NextGen TV to existing TV receivers with an HDMI connection, ADTH says the receiver can provide a better viewing experience (depending on available broadcasts), with better audio and video quality, High Dynamic Range (HDR) video, and immersive Dolby audio.

The ADTH receiver can support a maximum resolution of 2160p (or 4K-quality), along with HDR, Dolby AC-4 Audio, and A3SA content protection. The device includes a dual-band Wi-Fi receiver, Bluetooth 5.0, a remote control and power adapter.

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CEO Suzanne Scott said: “For the past 27 years, Scott has been an integral part of the Fox News Media family. His extraordinary work has helped transform our field operations and events coverage, ensuring our platforms continue to deliver best in class coverage from around the world.”

A Fox News Channel original, Wilder joined the network at its inception in 1996 as a field photographer. Since then, he has helped innovate and enhance all aspects of FNC’s breaking news and events programming, including all the network’s election coverage over nearly three decades.

In his previous role as senior vice president of field production and operations, Wilder oversaw the first two Republican presidential primary debates of the 2024 cycle. In September, he oversaw the production surrounding Fox Business Network’s debate moderated by Dana Perino and Stuart Varney in Simi Valley, Calif.

Additionally, in November 2023, he spearheaded Sean Hannity’s The Great Red vs. Blue State Debate: Newsom vs. DeSantis in Alpharetta, Georgia which pulled in more than 5 million viewers making it not only the highest-rated program of the night, but also out-rating the third non-Fox primary debate which took place the following week.

In 2022, Wilder led the network’s midterm election coverage, including several town halls and election night special programming, which was the most watched in all of television. Throughout his tenure with the network, he has overseen the production and operations for all major political events, including international presidential diplomacy trips and numerous G8 summits.

He has also helped create the signature look for Fox Nation’s annual Patriot Awards, which just held its fifth celebration at The Grand Ole Opry House in Nashville. Notably he oversaw the production of Queen Elizabeth’s funeral in 2022 as well as President Biden’s inauguration in 2021 along with special live coverage of his first joint address to congress.

Wilder also helped engineer more than 40 remote studios across the country as the pandemic mandated a global shutdown in 2020, ensuring Fox News Media platforms continued to deliver news and information to millions of viewers nationwide.

Throughout the pandemic, Wilder led all special events coverage, from the presidential campaign trail and the conventions to numerous COVID-19 related town halls, including with former President Donald Trump and his task force, to the social justice protests following the death of George Floyd and the memorial services honoring civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, all while maintaining social distancing and health safety protocols.

In addition to overseeing all of Fox News Media events coverage, Wilder has also helped innovate and advance the network’s technical and field operations units. In 2019, he was elevated to vice president of field operations where he transformed the production team, implementing a collaborative field production unit that created news-specific environments to broadcast around the world.

From 2017-2019, he served as director of field and aerial operations where he helped integrate new technologies into network coverage, including innovative drone footage that was used across breaking news and live events coverage. Previously, he served as ENG field operations supervisor from 2007 to 2017 and prior to that was the field photographer and coordinator of ENG operations.

The post Fox News Media Ups Scott Wilder To Production & Operations EVP appeared first on TV News Check.

Established more than 40 years ago in Berlin, Germany, Eurotape Media is now a provider of broadcast masters for major broadcasters. As part of its service, Eurotape also manages high-resolution film-to-digital transfers, using a wet-gate ARRISCAN. Throughout its daily workflows, Eurotape Media is handling high value, high resolution, large files which need to be securely managed, processed and delivered under tight deadlines.

To meet these goals, Eurotape has a shared storage network built on the R&S SpycerNode SC. This provides both scalability and support for very high bandwidth transfers: up to 22 Gb/s per node. This server network handles files at 4k Ultra HD and higher resolutions as necessary.

To create large numbers of deliverables in multiple formats, Eurotape Media standardized some time ago on the R&S Clipster. Now it has extended its capabilities by upgrading to the latest and most powerful version, the R&S Clipster 6 Mark 2, which is integrated into an automated work order system.

“The additional power speeds up the mastering process,” said Ralf Jesse, Eurotape studio manager. “It also gives us the ability to work in resolutions above 4K. That is important because we scan at up to 6K and now we do not need to downscale, which would be another time-consuming process. The same applies to HDR, which is now seamless in our delivery workflows.”

Looking at the integrated solution of SpycerNode and Clipster, Eurotape CEO Mathias Jentzen adds: “This is really the key to transforming the way we work. All our workstations — the film scanner, the grading, the retouch, the editing and all the rest — are all on the SpycerNode, so we never have to duplicate data. From the scanner all the way to Clipster for deliverables, we never have to think about transferring files.”

“Eurotape Media is a business with a huge reputation in a fast-paced industry known for its stringent requirements,” said Andre Vent, Rohde & Schwarz broadcast and media sales manager. “With our systems integration partner SHM Broadcast GmbH, we were able to demonstrate to Eurotape how to scale storage capacity with a centralized approach. With SpycerNode SC, Eurotape Media has a scalable storage system for reliable and high-performance production.”

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In a user study, 100% of respondents agreed that the GridSearch method was easy to use and took them to exactly where they wanted to be in the video. This compared with 86% that disagreed with the same statement connected to iPlayer. All of the surveyed respondents also found GridSearch to be at least twice as fast as iPlayer, with around a third stating it was more than six times as fast. It reduces the cognitive load of trying to understand what you are fast forwarding through.

Jonathan Bowes, GridSearch founder, said: “With so much content being watched on-demand, consumers want an easy way to navigate to the specific points they want to see. This is especially true for programs such as Strictly Come Dancing, where viewers might want to skip directly to the dances.”

While the tool has been developed to make it easier for end users to find the content they want to watch quickly, the company says it can also be used for production and post-production teams who need to navigate to a specific point for editing or quality checks.

Bowes added: “Editing teams are under increasing pressure to perform reviews and edits in record time. Our tool can make it much faster for them to find the precise point in the video, speeding up that process and ultimately helping get content to consumers fast. It is a complimentary tool to AI to allow content discovery in video archives.”

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Powered by Samba AI, a suite of generative AI and machine learning technologies available worldwide, Lenovo is among the first brands to leverage this solution to understand its return on sponsorship investments.

Samba TV says Samba AI “will automatically and instantly recognize when a company’s logo appears on screen — for sports programs, that could be on the track, field, jersey, or car — or when a brand is mentioned during a program, offering comprehensive viewership analysis that spans both traditional media and streaming TV. The product also analyzes the surrounding sentiment of brands, providing companies with a detailed understanding of their portrayal throughout the programming. The AI solution provides rapid analysis delivered to brands in-flight. It’s also interoperable within Samba TV’s outcome-based measurement suite, enabling brands to quickly activate targeting shifts based on the analysis.”

“Samba TV has been investing in R&D for generative AI and machine language (ML)-based analysis of video for more than a decade,” said Ashwin Navin, Samba TV co-founder and CEO. “We’re now taking our years of AI innovation a step further by working with some of the world’s most recognizable brands like Lenovo to transform the way media investments are evaluated. We are using our powerful first-party data to train best-in-class AI models to inform the most important decisions made by advertisers.”

As an early adoptee of this new AI solution, Lenovo has already been able to collect insights on its Title Race at Circuit of the Americas (COTA) in Austin. Samba TV said that on Oct. 22, 2023, there were 4,471 instances of the Lenovo brand throughout the race. “This frequency translated to strong exposure of the brand for the average viewers and was, in fact, higher than any other brand being advertised at the race. Lenovo sponsorship proved particularly successful as it generated 34% more exposure frequency than a comparable race and its title sponsor.”

Rick Corteville, Lenovo global media center of excellence executive director, said: “Measuring data and tracking analytics have always been critical in modern marketing to better gauge and understand the value of comprehensive brand appearances, including sponsorships and ad spend. Working with Samba TV has been a step forward in taking our data and better retargeting key audiences to build frequency and drive awareness of Lenovo’s brand and tech innovations. Thanks to Samba TV’s insights, we have been able to more accurately measure the value of our F1 partnership across North America. We are looking forward to further testing this solution and linking it to our brand lift and demand generation KPIs.”

Samba TV said Samba AI “goes beyond traditional monitoring and offers recommendations, tactics, and strategic insights into competitor’s activities and audience overlaps between events. These insights can then provide brands with massive opportunities to create incremental reach, eliminate waste, and create a competitive edge, allowing them to adapt their strategies based on the comprehensive market dynamics captured by the solution and help drive expanded monetization capabilities. Additionally, brands can leverage Samba TV’s comprehensive first-party viewership data to create new audience segments for targeted advertising. This feature helps brands to amplify their reach by connecting with the right audience, at the right time, in the right context.”

Samba TV will be hosting demonstrations of this product at CES, Jan. 9-12, for partners and clients.

The post Samba TV Extends Samba AI To Holistically Measure ROI From Paid Media, Product Placement, Sports Sponsorship appeared first on TV News Check.

This year’s show, which runs Jan. 9-12, should be bigger than the 2023 edition. That show drew 117,000 attendees and 3,200 exhibitors and represented a significant bounce-back from the 45,000 attendees and 2,300 exhibitors that came in 2022, the first show after a one-year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Consumer Technology Association (CTA), which owns and produces CES and is celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2024, is projecting attendance to be 130,000 with more than 3,500 exhibitors.

“We are seeing huge momentum for CES 2024,” says Kinsey Fabrizio, CTA senior vice president of CES and membership.

A Bigger Footprint

As of early December, CTA had already booked 2.4 million net square feet of exhibit space, Fabrizio says, which is over a 10% jump from CES 2023. The CES 2024 exhibition and conference will be spread across the North, Central and West Halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center as well as several Las Vegas hotels, including 1,000 startup companies exhibiting in “Eureka Park” at the Venetian. Over half of Fortune 500 companies will be in attendance, including Amazon, Google, Intel, Qualcomm, LG, Samsung and Sony.

AI’s Big Year

AI is the “hottest topic in the tech industry right now,” says John Kelley, VP and show director, CES. AI will be “pervasive” across the show floor and conference sessions, Kelley says, including a keynote from Intel CEO Patrick Gelsinger discussing the critical role that chips and software play in making AI more accessible.

“What’s changed in the last year is generative AI has taken the world by storm, and every company is thinking about how to use it,” says CTA President-CEO Gary Shapiro. “And I know many, many, many companies are going to be talking about AI and introducing and showing products that take advantage of that.”

Another growth area for CES is automotive and mobility, Kelley says, with more than 300 companies exhibiting in an at-capacity West Hall including Honda, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai and Kia. The “C Space” Entertainment and Content conference at the Aria, which features brands like Amazon Ads, Netflix, NBC Universal, Roku and Snap, has also expanded with additional space in the Cosmopolitan hotel this year including new exhibitors Disney, NVIDIA, Paramount and Reddit.

Noteworthy “C Space” panels for broadcasters include “2024: The AI Inflection Point — Entertainment, Internet & Media” featuring Steve Canepa, GM, Global Industries, IBM and Richard Kerris, VP/GM, media and entertainment, NVIDIA; “Future of TV & Streaming: Cable, Internet TV & FAST Strategies,” with executives from Tubi, Disney, PBS and Nielsen; “Monetizing the TV/Streaming, Programming Platforms: The Strategies” with executives from Uber, Amazon Ads, Vizio, Disney and Estrella Media; and “Transforming An All-American Brand: Technology Inside The Weather Channel,” with Tom O’Brien, EVP, Allen Media Group; Nora Zimmett, president, news and original series, Allen Media Group; and Alexandra Wilson, meteorologist, The Weather Company.

‘A Good Way To Kick Off The Year’

With many top network and station group executives at CES, many media technology vendors will also be there, if not to exhibit but to simply meet with their customers and partners. One of them is IP transport provider Zixi, which has been experiencing big growth in its live event business due to the explosion in streaming sports coverage. Zixi won’t have a booth or suite at CES but is still sending a team of six, including members of its executive team as well as technical support personnel. That is double the number of people it sent in 2023.

“The number of companies that is going is starting to grow again,” says John Wastcoat, Zixi SVP business development and marketing. “We’re not going to be able to handle it with just a handful of people this year, so that’s why we’re doubling our team that’s going to go out and meet with everybody. And it’s an easy hop from L.A., so people can make a day trip if they need to … they’ll be in and have three or four meetings and be out, without a significant investment.”

Zixi has two motivations to attend CES that are interconnected.

“One is that our customers and our partners are looking for different ways to monetize their content,” Wastcoat says. “That could be sending it directly to a new smart TV, we do that with Bloomberg around the world. We have conversations with the automobile manufacturers about sending content directly to their screens as well. So, we’ve got that angle.

“And then our customers and partners are still looking at what’s going to be new and interesting for them over the next few years,” he adds. “So, we’re there to talk with them about what we need to do together in 2024, whether that aligns with anything that’s found at CES or not. But it’s a good way to kick off the year.”

While over time the overall focus at CES has shifted away from television sets and Blu-ray players to a range of different consumer technology products, Zixi is still very interested in how its IP transport technology integrates with TV sets to deliver programming to the living room.

“We are seeing a tremendous increase in our business because of the reallocation of sports rights to digital-first platforms that didn’t have infrastructure for it before,” Wastcoat says. “We’re forecasting a million live sports events in 2024 that will use Zixi, and two years ago we probably would have said we’re not very interested in occasional use business like that, we’re looking for the 24/7 constant traffic. But it has become such a volume pay that it has got our attention. So, companies like Amazon Prime [Video] are coming to us and asking us for new features and functionality, like scheduling tools to be able to manage these thousands of events that they’re doing.”

Another broadcast vendor making the trip is robotic camera specialist Mark Roberts Motion Control (MRMC), which will be exhibiting in the booth of its parent company Nikon. MRMC will once again collaborate with virtual production specialist Vu Studios to deliver the “Unreal Ride.” For CES 2024 the Unreal Ride environment will take place in a virtual jungle, where participants will get to experience the thrill of riding through it in a futuristic Jeep and once again be able to take away a video of themselves travelling through the virtual world.

MRMC’s technology can also be seen elsewhere on the show floor as several companies rent MRMC’s robotic arms just to draw attention to their booths.

“One of them has a light wand on it, and it attracts people because they see it doing funny patterns,” says Paddy Taylor, MRMC head of broadcast.

While MRMC does makes some products that it is actively marketing at CES, such as automatic tracking software and low-cost sliders for PTZ cameras, Taylor doesn’t expect to get many new customers for the company’s high-end specialized robotics at CES.

“It’s more of a positioning exercise,” Taylor says.

One of the messages that MRMC is looking to get across is that Nikon is serious about video, as more broadcasters and other professional videographers start to use DSLR-style cameras for content capture.

“With the Z 9 Nikon probably has the best DSLR-style mirrorless camera for video, and Nikon’s starting to make a really big thing about that,” Taylor says. “And we’re doing some things to move that camera and make it do interesting things.”

The other message that Taylor wants to emphasize is that MRMC expects full-frame cameras like the Sony HDC-F5500, which use the same type of large sensors as digital cinema cameras, will start to be used en masse in broadcast production in 2024 to provide a different look for live sports and news. And MRMC sees an opportunity there for its robotic systems.

“We have a few customers using Sony Venice [digital cinema cameras] with our robotics, but in live current affairs and sports studios,” Taylor says. “And I think with the Olympics and a few other events next year you’ve got more full-frame system cameras coming onto the market. You’re going to see a marry-up, where people are trying to mix different types of full-frame cameras in different workflows for sporting events, festivals, concerts — anything with a creative edge people are trying to strive for.”

New Services For NextGen TV

Broadcasters will also use CES 2024 to promote the continued rollout of the ATSC 3.0, or NextGen TV, digital television standard through demonstrations put on by ATSC and the Pearl TV coalition of station groups.

“There’s going to be a focus on the consumer, both on the services side and device side,” says ATSC President Madeleine Noland. “You’re going to see a proliferation of devices, more set-top boxes, more television models and a few extras.”

NextGen launched in 12 more markets in 2023, including top 10 markets Philadelphia and New York, and CTA says that 10 million NextGen TV sets have been sold in the U.S. to date. With planned launches in Chicago, San Diego and Tucson coming next month, 3.0 signals should be lit up in 75 markets covering 75% of U.S. TV households by the end of January, Noland says. She notes that 3.0 is also making significant progress internationally, with Brazil having chosen 3.0 technology for most of its new mandated digital TV standard and a final decision on the physical, or RF transmission, layer due next year.

Big Four networks ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC are all sponsors of the ATSC booth in Central Hall, which will have 13 different TV models, four different set-tops and one prototype mobile phone. The booth will also feature various demonstrations of high dynamic range (HDR) and enhanced audio content, including an “immersive entertainment room” sponsored by Dolby and major-league sports programming. There will also be a mosaic of various interactive applications enabled by 3.0’s broadband backchannel including “Start Over” capability developed by E.W. Scripps; an interactive music service from Sinclair; and sports statistics, gaming and news applications.

“What you’ll see at CES are almost fully-baked services that will hit the consumer this year, the gaming applications, the sports interactivity, the Start Over application,” says Mark Aitken, president, ONE Media and SVP of advanced technology for Sinclair. “There are a number of broadcasters, beyond us, who are now beyond the planning phase of adding HDR to their programming. Some of these become more and more relevant in respect to sports coming back to local broadcasting.”

Another new capability that ATSC and Pearl TV will be demonstrating is “broadcast IP,” which is a way to deliver a local station’s enhanced 3.0 programming to a 3.0 TV set as a “virtual channel” over broadband. This is a capability that is particularly important given the current spectrum landscape for 3.0, where often there is not enough capacity for every station that wants to offer 3.0 to be supported in a market.

Pearl TV first tested broadcast IP in Phoenix several years ago, says Pearl TV Managing Director Anne Schelle, working with set makers LG, Sony and Samsung, and successfully deployed it last spring for South Florida PBS’s stations in Miami.

The way that broadcast IP works is that a host 3.0 station transmits tiny bits of metadata within its over-the-air stream that can be picked up by a NextGen TV set and point to an internet server carrying the “virtual channel” of another station in the market that isn’t actually broadcasting in 3.0 due to capacity constraints. The virtual channel is displayed like a 3.0 channel in the over-the-air electronic program guide (EPG) on the NextGen TV set. When a viewer clicks on it that station’s 3.0 programming is then streamed to the set via the broadband connection.

However, the broadcast IP “virtual channel” shouldn’t be thought of as simply another FAST or streaming channel because it’s only available through the OTA guide, Schelle says. And it does require an agreement between two stations to enable transmission of the “tiny bits” of data necessary for the guide info.

“Our first goal was to bring up the PBS stations in South Florida to ensure that TVs can see it,” Schelle says. “It’s geofenced, you’re transmitting the URL in your stream, and it goes out and grabs the content from a server and puts it up in the OTA EPG. But you can only get it if you have antenna, you can’t get it otherwise.”

In Las Vegas, Sinclair is working with Gray Television and Fox to enable the broadcast IP transmission of KVVU, Gray’s Fox affiliate in the market, which couldn’t find traditional RF capacity for 3.0 programming.

“They want to offer their Fox station in 3.0 so they can enhance it with the same capabilities as if they were on-air in 3.0, to do 1080p and HDR, or even do 4K,” Schelle says. “They can also do [interactive] applications, the RUN3TV app works in the IP channel as well. They can basically do everything they can do in 3.0.”

The post For Broadcasters And Their Vendors, AI And IP Delivery Are Top Of Mind At CES appeared first on TV News Check.

Sony Electronics provides the backbone of VCS with its high-end cameras and machine learning software, essential for producing top-notch content. GeniusXR, a Montreal-based multidisciplinary content creation and development studio, brings its expertise in XR content and partners with Sony on this deployment. The Levan Center of Innovation studio installation marks Sony’s second volumetric studio venture in North America, the first being at College D’Alma in Northeast Canada.

Azad Abbasi, GeniusXR founder/CEO, says: “The Volumetric Capture Studio represents a significant leap forward in the world of immersive content creation. It opens up endless possibilities for creators and innovators across various industries. We’re dedicated to leveraging cutting-edge technologies, including Artificial Intelligence, to create immersive storytelling experiences in the metaverse. This partnership with the Alan B. Levan | NSU Broward Center of Innovation and Sony exemplifies our commitment to pushing the boundaries of Virtual and Augmented Reality.”

Anthony Guidry, Sony Electronics product manager, adds: “We are thrilled to be a part of this groundbreaking project with the Levan Center of Innovation and GeniusXR. VCS is a testament to our dedication to pushing the boundaries of technology and creativity, and this partnership allows us to expand the horizons of how this transformative technology can be used.”

The Volumetric Capture Studio within the Levan Center of Innovation features a 5-meter diameter dome equipped with 75 Sony RX0 II 1” (1.0-type) sensor ultra-compact 4Ki cameras and 70 lighting panels. This collaborative effort “is set to redefine how we experience immersive 3D content and is one of the only two community-accessible studios of its kind in North America.”

“The Levan Center of Innovation is committed to driving innovation and entrepreneurship in South Florida and beyond,” says John Wensveen, Ph.D., chief innovation officer of Nova Southeastern University (NSU) and Executive Director of the Alan B. Levan | NSU Broward Center of Innovation. “This Volumetric Capture Studio is a flagship project that embodies our dedication to fostering breakthrough ideation, technology, and entrepreneurship. This studio serves as a pilot for exploring the vast potential of volumetric technology, enabling us to create a talent skills pipeline, drive company formation, and contribute to job creation in the region.”

The primary goal of the Volumetric Capture Studio is to extend the use and adoption of volumetric video capturing technology. This pilot program will pave the way for innovative applications in fields such as education, health care, engineering and more.

In addition to expanding the use of this transformative technology, the partnership between the Levan Center of Innovation and Sony aims to create training certifications that will equip individuals and professionals with the skills to harness the full potential of VCS.

The Volumetric Capture Suite comprises a capture rig, capture software, and render software to film a subject and process and render out a selected segment to produce the set of files required to create, edit, and manipulate volumetric assets. The user guide provides capture best practices and instructions on how to operate the software to perform a capture through delivery of the final model.

NSU Broward Center of Innovation (Levan Center of Innovation) is a public-private partnership between Nova Southeastern University (NSU) and Broward County, Fla.

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She has more than two decades in technical operations and ad sales beginning with OnMedia where she began her career developing a crucial ingest and processing system for Ampersand orders and quickly advanced to broader responsibilities. Her most recent position was as senior director of ad sales operations, where she led the IT, client services and traffic teams. Schneider also spearheaded key technical projects and was instrumental in OnMedia’s initial integration with Pilot, demonstrating her versatile leadership and technical expertise.

In her new role, she will be responsible for the technical orchestration of onboarding new clients, managing third-party integrations, and spearheading user training programs. “Her contributions will be crucial in refining ShowSeeker’s onboarding process, optimizing technical workflows, and sustaining direct and transparent communication with client stakeholders,” the company said.

“Bringing Rose Schneider on board as our vice president of technical operations underscores our commitment to leading the way in technical innovation and operational excellence,” said Dave Hardy, ShowSeeker CEO. “I am confident that her background and track record will serve to enhance efficiencies across our entire technical and development organization. Rose has garnered the deep respect of her previous staff, industry peers, and companies throughout the ad tech community. We are fortunate and thrilled to have her join our team.”

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To which John Hane says pshaw.

Hane, president and CEO of the BitPath NextGen consortium between Nexstar and Sinclair, says data leasing revenue could start rolling in within select markets or regions inside of the next year. He sees that the mountain NextGen TV has yet to scale is massive, but argues the progress made so far in lighting up new ATSC 3.0 markets is also considerable.

In this Talking TV conversation, Hane takes the measure of that progress, lays out the challenges still in front of the technology’s implementation, and ventures a guess as to when it will finally become a significant percentage of broadcasters’ bottom line.

Episode transcript below, edited for clarity.

Michael Depp: BitPath is a spectrum consortium between Nexstar and Sinclair built on ATSC 3 architecture to deliver data and create new revenue streams for TV broadcasters. So, how is that whole new revenue stream thing going?

I’m Michael Depp, editor of TVNewsCheck, and this is Talking TV. My guest today is John Hane, president and CEO of BitPath. We’ll be doing a check in with how far along BitPath has come in building its network, the challenges it continues to face in its growth and the biggest question of all: When, if ever, is ATSC 3 going to become a viable revenue stream for broadcasters? We’ll be right back with that conversation.

Welcome, John Hane, to Talking TV.

John Hane: Hey, Michael. Thanks for having me.

Good to see you. John, I wanted to talk about ATSC 3 and revenue right now because we’re coming up on the NAB Show in Las Vegas next month and checking in with NextGen TV is always an important part of the narrative at the show. I’m also supposed to be moderating a panel on NextGen revenue with a trio of station group leaders during the show, so there’s a good chance for me to do a little prep in advance. So, let’s check in with the situation. First of all, how many markets is Next-Gen lit up in now?

John Hane: In terms of number of markets, I don’t know. It’s well over 60% depending on how you count. People count differently, but 60% of the population in terms of markets, we have, I think as of the end of this month. We’re launching a top 10 market this month. We’ll have, I think, seven of the top 10. Something like 20 or 21 of the top 25 and 43 or 44 of the top 50. So, we’re filling in the gaps. I mean, there’s been a lot of activity. A lot of markets have launched. We’re still waiting for some big ones to pop, including one that we’re launching this month. But we’re continuing to roll out markets. We have markets on the rollout plan for every quarter of the year.

So, are you on schedule? Ahead? Behind?

We didn’t have a formal schedule for getting everything done because there’s no central management of this process. We’ve led the significant majority of BitPath, our team has led … and when I say led, I mean the people doing the work are the station groups. We’re just sort of nudging and providing some coordination services and helping figure out the hosting plans. But we’ve been involved in the great majority of the rollouts. Pearl has done a number of rollouts, including some of the big markets and others have sort of rolled out on their own without any sort of participation in either of BitPath or Pearl.

The industry is moving along. You know, I guess you can call it organically. We didn’t have a hard schedule. What I liked and, you know, I guess a good phrase is ‘how are we doing?’ Better than I expected, but not as good as I could have hoped for. I think we’re in a good place. We need to fill in these holes and the top 50, top 25 and especially in the top 10.

You know, as you get into the remaining large markets, they have various complicated issues that have to be worked through and they take time. And not everything is within all the players’ control. So, I’m highly confident that they’re going to be work out. I wish they were worked out, you know, now. But everybody in those markets that is planning to transition to 3.0 is working very hard on it.

You touched on a key issue there. There’s no central management of all this. So, that’s kind of one of the things that makes this very tough, isn’t it?

Yes, it is.

All right. Your consortium believes that data leasing is going to be ATSC 3’s real revenue superpower, right?

I think it is a real revenue superpower. So, you know, I did I was involved in retransmission negotiations for the first 10 or 12 years of that and since some of the major and groundbreaking ones. So, I’m very aware of the changes and the profile of advertising versus subscription revenue. And I think with 3.0, the television side is extremely relevant to that. I won’t go down that rabbit hole now, but I think it’s super, super important. And people who discount the importance of 3.0 to revenue on the core television side, I think are selling it short.

You have to look at two factors: what are the growth opportunities and what are the opportunities of 3.0 to sort of mitigate some of the headwinds that are in the existing business in particular as they affect the revenue streams. So yes, I do think on a bit-for-bit basis, there is no question that much higher revenue can be delivered per bit through data services, through non-traditional television data services. But I’m not discounting at all, you know, the revenue opportunity inside the core business.

Well, let’s stick to the one rabbit hole, though, OK? For the uninitiated, very briefly, can you explain how that works?

The way that we evaluate it is in order to provide wireless data services, you need a tremendous amount of infrastructure. You need management systems, you need devices, you need control systems. You need all of those things. Well, the highest cost items really are the RF infrastructure, the spectrum licenses, the towers. That is far and away the highest capital cost associated with providing wireless data services.

We have that in place. So, the way that we view it is we need to provision these participating stations to be able to provide ATSC 3 data, and that’s once you’ve switched over, it’s really fairly uncomplicated and we’re sort of building a playbook of how we do that in an effective way. Then you’re able to transmit, then you’re able to put data in.

You have to have devices, right? You have to have receiver devices in addition to the regular television sets. So, we’re working on that part, too, and we’ve developed a few core businesses that we intend to launch first that we think are compatible with where we are in the transition.

And we’re working on optimizing the way we get that data into the television stations. We have a plan operating now, and also how we sort of get the market for user devices going so that we can have customers for those services.

OK, but in order to capitalize on data leasing, you have to have these important things that fall into place. First, you need a national footprint of NextGen stations to light up and then they have to join your network, right?

You don’t need a national network for everything. You need a national network for some services. And ultimately the full realization of that potential is when you have a national network. But the services that we’re launching initially are services that don’t require the national network or national coverage. They’re services that are sort of more market-oriented to individual markets.

And those would be, if you think about one of our first target verticals is energy distribution. Those tend to be clustered in specific geographic regions. And they’re heavy users of certain kind of data and in particular certain kinds of data services. So, we can provision those. If you think about, I mean, here in the Washington, D.C., metro, Pepco, which will make electric power, is the big electricity provider. Our coverage in D.C. already covers substantially all of Cape Coast footprint in the region.

But to get the full potential and to have the national network in place, about how far along are you from realizing that?

Well, we have over 60% of the country covered.

I mean timewise. Are we talking a couple of years?

I think we’re clearly over halfway. I mean, if you’re talking about the long tail and getting down to market 200, you know, some of those are very difficult because many of them have only one or two stations. If it’s one station, you have to flash cut it. But to have a substantially complete nationwide network, you know, I think if we could get some regulatory certainty from the FCC, I could see it being done in two years.

And the biggest markets you mentioned before, they’re the toughest to launch, right? The most complicated?

Well, they have a sort of a unique set of complications. There are some things that are more difficult. Some of them have not been that difficult. Some of them are proving exceptionally difficult and they’ve just taken a lot more work.

And the second dynamic required to monetize data leasing, as I understand, is the companies that want to lease the data transfer services from you need to build these compatible receivers on their ends as sort of destinations for the data that they send.

Right.

How hard of an ask is that to make of those companies?

You know, I think it’s a hard ask today because the full coverage and the full network is not in place and that’s why we’re not waiting for that. We’re building our own receiver devices and the first services we launch will be our own branded services that we will provide directly. And we’re building and working on acquiring compatible devices for that service. So, we’re not going to wait for third parties.

And I think there’s a lot to be said for this approach. If we wait for others to come build devices to buy our services, I think we’re going to be waiting until everything is built. You have to prove that it works, and we know that it works. We’re proving it in the field. We’re building the devices. We’re showing very high value on some particular verticals. Are the devices optimal today? No, they’re not.

But we’re working very hard on getting better form factors, lower power requirements, moving closer to where we ultimately want to be for a really widespread consumer B2C and B2B set of customers throughout the economy, including end user retail economists, customers. We’re building the devices depending on how well that goes. You know, we could have paying customers early next year.

I hear what you’re saying about this incremental kind of market-based or regional-based implementation of this right now as a lead up to more national services. But all in all, there are some pretty complicated things that need to fall into place here for the cash register to start really ringing for broadcasters. What do you say to the critics or the skeptics who say this is all just too complicated and it’s never going to happen?

People that say this is too complicated are people who have not launched, you know, wireless data services and they’re sort of not familiar with the processes. The project steps, the way you finance these things, it’s an unknown. So, if I took somebody from satellite or mobile wireless and drop them at the NAB and some of them work in some of the sessions that seem very important and topical to everybody who listens to and watches this podcast, you know, they wouldn’t know what we were talking about, and it would seem all very difficult and arcane. But, you know, our staff is built of people who do this.

Our contractors and providers are people who do this. I’ve done this in the past. You know, these are known steps, right? It’s just a matter of us taking them out, execution and success in the marketplace. You know, those depend on a lot of factors. But knowing how to get from point A to point B, how to build a network, how to start before the network is fully built, how to sort of step into it methodically, those are known things.

OK, you are a true believer. Obviously, you are John the Baptist here. So, given that, when do you think the broadcasters are really going to see an ROI on this technology? When are we going to see it as a business line in the earnings reports?

On the on the data side, only separating that from the core business you asked me to do, I think so. When you say an ROI, I would say if you’re talking about the incremental cost of propagating data, for our initial services it’s very, very low. So, I think the ROI will be really good as soon as it starts, and I think it could start next year. We’re not going to burden the full cost of the transition in the first year or two on the first data services that we launch. But if you look at them on a on a bit-for-bit basis for the capital cost of setting those services up and for the operating cost of provisioning them and for the capacity overhead that we’re taking away from television, which by the way, for everything we’re planning for the next four years is trivial. You don’t have to stop any television service at all in order to accommodate this.

Now, BIA sort of famously projected that by 2030, revenue from NextGen datacasting could run between $6.5 and $15 billion for the industry. How many millions are you personally willing to bet on the accuracy of that prediction?

Well, I didn’t make the predictions, so I don’t want to bet on the accuracy. But I definitely believe the business falls somewhere in there.

Does the timeline sound right to you as well?

Yeah, I think so. I mean, so here are the things that we don’t have within our control. When we set up these transition rules with the FCC, they were not the rules that we wanted. They were a negotiated set of rules that had a lot of input from cable competitors, and we didn’t get everything we wanted. And even if we had gotten everything we wanted, it was impossible to know back then exactly how this would play out. Right. So, we’re sort of at the midpoint or better and we need some adjustments.

So, you’re asking for that FCC task force?

Well, we need a task force, and we need some relief on the hosting rules. The hosting rules have some fairly perverse consequences, given the way that things are rolled out, particularly with the growth of diginets. So, you know, we’ve we’re working with the [FCC] Media Bureau and with the commission. I’m not sure that they fully appreciate the urgency of this. The rule changes can’t or are not a sufficient condition to wrap this up quickly, but they’re clearly a necessary condition. They’re absolutely a necessary condition.

And I’ll give you an example. In the largest market, and we’re not managing that market, but in the largest market, there’s a particularly difficult problem. And the parties have come up with different solutions. And one of the solutions would require what, to my mind, would be a very inconsequential modification or waiver of the hosting roles. And I think the commission is very concerned about it and overthinking it. But that’s my perspective.

So, I think relief from the FCC could definitely ease things and speed them up. It’s not going to solve it. We have a lot of commercial business and technical and other issues that we have to tackle. But, you know, we’re way along the way when you have, you know, 21, 22 of the top 25, you have most of the top 50. We have a lot more going up, the 75 and even 100. You know, there’s been a lot of metal bends. I mean, we’re bending metal, right? This is happening.

Well, you may get a chance to buttonhole FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel next month, if you’re lucky.

I hope so.

Well, John Hane, it’s been good to check in with you and see you at the NAB show in April.

Absolutely. Thank you.

Thanks to all of you for watching and listening. You can catch past episodes of Talking TV on TVNewsCheck.com and on our YouTube page. We’ll see you next time. Thanks.

The post Best Of Talking TV: When Is NextGen TV Revenue Coming? appeared first on TV News Check.

With this latest innovation, the company says, “users can now generate a complete audio ad simply by uploading a picture such as a product image, billboard ad or even a photo of a storefront. This cutting-edge feature leverages the latest AI technology to analyze visual elements to create an engaging script before selecting suitable AI voices, music and sound effects to deliver a fully produced audio ad.”

The platform uses AI to analyze the content of a picture, identifying brands, slogans, styles, target audience and much more to write a creative brief. From the creative brief an ad script is created, voices, music and sound effects are curated before mixing all the elements together in a matter of minutes.

“Adthos is committed to revolutionizing the way audio advertising is produced,” says Raoul Wedel, Adthos CEO. “Our new feature is a game-changer, instantly unlocking the potential of audio advertising for anyone that can take a picture.”

Adthos Creative Studio’s new feature is an addition to the Self-Service portal, “designed to streamline the ad creation process and bring the power of AI to businesses of all sizes.”

The makers of Adthos have created a short video introduction to the feature to provide more insight on the possibilities. Those interested in experiencing the creative power of this new feature for themselves can apply for a free trial via the website.

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Mike Jordan

Control and automation manufacturer RTI has appointe Mike Jordan chief product officer, reporting to CEO Joe Roberts. In this new role, Jordan will oversee product development activities.

“We welcome Mike to the RTI team and look forward to his vision and leadership,” Roberts says. “Not only does Mike bring a history of success in the channel, but he shares our deep commitment to the commercial and residential integrators who install our products. We look forward to his leadership as we develop and execute the road map that builds our control and automation footprint worldwide.”

Jordan has more than 12 years of leadership in the industry. For the past five years, he was the senior vice president of products at Snap One, including leadership of the Control4 product line.

Prior to Snap One, he held a similar role at Core Brands, where he worked with Roberts, who was president of the company at the time.

“I look forward to working with Joe again as well as with our founder and CTO, Kevin Marty, and the entire RTI team to develop unique solutions focused on solving our integrator and distributor partners’ needs in all our global markets,” Jordan says.

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Leonardo Teixeira, AD Digital head of sales, says: “After we completed market research, it became clear that the TAG solutions could add a lot to our portfolio. We’re excited to bring the platform with all its benefits to broadcasters and content owners in Latin America. The platform’s advanced multiviewer capabilities, for example, show a significant cost-benefit for our industry. I believe that we will be able to serve the market with a range of new possibilities, especially concerning streaming, live production, and playout.”

For the integrator, TAG’s software-based architecture, its ability to work at scale (on premise, VM or cloud computing), its capability to handle SDI and ST-2110 signals as well as multiple formats, and its integration with other solutions and ecosystems “were standout features.”

AD Digital will serve as TAG’s regional representative, providing sales and support services on a local level for the complete platform with emphasis on the multiviewer, live production, playout, and cloud services. “We are thrilled to partner with AD Digital to bring our cutting-edge solutions to Latin America,” says Alex Fano, TAG Video Systems director of sales in LATAM. “AD Digital’s expertise and strong industry relationships make them the perfect partner to grow our presence in the region and support our customers with the excellent service they expect from a TAG solution. Together, we will deliver the highest quality and exceptional customer service.”

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Nevion VideoIPath is a key component of Sony’s Networked Live offering, and is deployed by broadcasters and telecom service providers throughout the world in applications as diverse as contribution, remote production, facilities, OB trucks and GCCG (ground-to-cloud-cloud-to-ground). VideoIPath is also an open system that allows it to be integrated into existing environments, with interfaces to any device and equipment, and support for familiar control surfaces.

Overall, the company says, the new release “benefits from a new graphic user-interface (GUI) with a modern look and feel, which brings improved search and filtering, faster refresh of the user interface when changes occur, and more customization options allowing users to tailor their user experience.” The GUI now allows linking between different applications, significantly reducing the number of clicks required and increasing operator efficiency.

VideoIPath’s functionality to manage broadcast operations has been a key focus area for the 2023 LTS release, with an emphasis on enabling workflows that take advantage of the flexibility offered by IP, including in hybrid SDI/IP environments. One example is support for camera control workflows and fast switching in IP (we can be used for shading, for example). The release also now encompasses support for GPIO connection management and logic.

VideoIPath’s network and resource orchestration capabilities have also been further enhanced, the company says. “A special emphasis has been put on scalability and performance, with one of the largest VideoIPath deployments now involving over 200,000 endpoints and 81,000 simultaneous connections – and growing. The release contains new north-bound interfaces (including legacy protocols) to support systems and control surfaces familiar to users, as well as multiple south-bound drivers for production equipment – building on the already extensive list of device interfaces offered by VideoIPath.”

Arne Johan Martinsen, VideoIPath product manager for Nevion, says: “This 2023 LTS release represents a significant step forward, with new functionality building on the existing broadcast operations, resource orchestration and monitoring capabilities of VideoIPath. While some of the new features were pre-released during the year for use in specific projects, we are pleased to enable all our customers to benefit from them, as part of their upgrade plans.”

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Several groups have undertaken large-scale digitization efforts to tackle the problem, with some exploring new AI and ML (machine learning) tools to more efficiently tag and index video. Regardless of the method, generating accurate metadata is key to any archive efforts, both for old content and fresh material being created today, said broadcasters last week at TVNewsCheck’s NewsTECHForum in New York City.

Metadata’s Critical Role

“Before we can actually monetize the archives in a reasonable way, we have to have metadata on it,” said Mike Palmer, AVP, advanced technology/media management for Sinclair. “And in many cases, most cases, we have not been putting good metadata on it.”

Palmer, speaking on the panel “Harvesting the Archive for New Content and Opportunities” moderated by this reporter, said archive metadata must not only include enough information to find content using a media asset management (MAM) system. It also needs to have information about the rights attached to the content, since most call-letter stations have a mix of content they shot themselves, and fully own the rights to, and derivative content originally sourced from a network news service.

There isn’t any technical means today to tell whether a station owns a piece of content or not, Palmer said. That question can usually be answered only by calling and (hopefully) finding an employee who was there when it first aired.

“How long have we been talking about archives and metadata, but we’re not bringing back basic information about ownership, what camera it was shot on, the date, the geolocation, all this metadata that is in the cameras that we should be carrying forward,” Palmer said. “And we’re recreating the same problem that we’re trying to solve today with AI and ML because we’re simply not putting the right metadata on that content as it moves into the archive.”

Palmer said the culprit for lost camera metadata is often nonlinear editing systems that strip it out during the production process. To combat the problem going forward he sees a solution in the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) standard, as promoted by the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI). C2PA specifies provenance metadata that survives all the way from camera to distribution. C2PA not only addresses content ownership, but also content authenticity, an issue of growing importance in the age of AI-generated fake images.

‘A Wildly Human Process’

To improve accessibility of content for its journalists and producers, Hearst Television began digitizing the archives across its stations in 2021. To date it has digitized about 20%-25% of its archive material, representing roughly 45,000 hours of video.

“We parachute into a couple of stations at a time and help them digitize their archives in a systematic way,” said Devon Armijo, director, digital news integration for Hearst Television. “We bring in archival staff that handles not only the physical media but also the paper data that associates with it. Not only do we focus on digitization, but they also are not only tagging. They are looking at it in a discovery way. making sure they’re telling about the editorial opportunities, the promotional opportunities and sometimes the sales opportunities that are there in the archives — things that are sealed in the tapes that folks may know or not know that they have.”

While Hearst makes some use of automation, Armijo said that digitization remains “a wildly human process,” particularly when dealing with physical media that is beyond its end of life, such as 40-50 year-old tapes. That is where Hearst’s archivists serve as “the first line of defense.”

“They’re putting tapes through on a daily basis and making so many human decisions, up front at the beginning of digitization, that helps you with any sort of automation that rolls through afterwards,” Armijo said. “We had some automation processes throughout, like black [frame] detection. But that stuff is all secondary to the human decisions, the conversations, and understanding the history of not only the station but the content that’s there in your archive.”

Hearst licenses archive content to third parties, Armijo said, but the group itself remains “our first customer.” So far this year, Hearst has used its archive to produce over 370 pieces of digital original content along with a handful of linear specials and some local streaming content, including the popular true crime series Hometown Tragedy.

Fox is digitizing the archives across its station group as well as Fox News and Fox Business and bringing them into cloud storage. It has taken a different approach than Hearst by outsourcing the work, which encompasses tens of thousands of U-matic, one-inch and two-inch tapes, 16mm and 35mm film and various digital tape formats.

“We have tractor trailers come and pick up the entire library and it goes off to one of our five digitizing vendors, and then it works through their process,” said Ben Ramos, VP, Fox Archive, field and emerging tech, Fox News. “They have around 35 metadata enhancers who watch every frame of it, and kind of tag it as they’re going through it. It’s very manual, we haven’t gotten to too many AI/ML tools yet.”

Fox’s first goal was to preserve “at-risk” content like one-inch, two-inch and U-matic libraries, with the second objective being to generate ROI by licensing content to third-party documentary filmmakers. The initial effort was aimed at 5,000 U-matic tapes.

“What do we have in there, what’s the failure rate, and can we find ROI?” Ramos said. “We found ROI within six months, so that kind of supercharged the process, and then we got to do the rest of the 70,000 U-matic, two-inch and one-inch, and then we started dipping into the more expensive 16mm.”

Fox has experienced a failure rate of 3%-5% on that older content, and those impaired assets are now sitting on two pallets “awaiting further remediation,” Ramos said. That could involve baking them for several weeks to remove moisture, or even cracking tapes open to clean them and rehouse them.

Overall, it is a slow process, and so far, Fox has only digitized about 8% or 9% of its total physical media assets. One of the surprising findings is that newer formats like Beta, DV and DVCPRO tapes are also experiencing similar 3%-5% failure rates during the digitization process, and some of the older one-inch and U-matic tapes are actually playing better depending on how and where they were stored.

“Now everything feels a little bit at risk,” Ramos said.

Finding Answers With AI, ML

Sinclair was early in archiving some of its content in the public cloud, and last year struck a deal with producer Anthony Zuiker to mine its news archives to create original content that can be licensed to third parties. The group has around 23 million assets that were “born digital,” Palmer said, which means they been archived from a newsroom computer system with a script attached to it. Those assets have accurate metadata, allowing one to search that content across the entire enterprise and access it. Sinclair also has another roughly 10 million assets sitting on shelves on varied physical media.

“The question at this point is what do we want to invest in to bring this back?” Palmer said. “We look at news content, and it’s a fact that most news content has no value in the archive. It is the rare jewel that justifies the expense of all the rest of the work that you put into that. So, we’re focused right now in trying to determine, to the best of our knowledge, which portions of the archive have the highest probability for containing those jewels, and then go mining in that direction. And we may not — I say may, because there are no hard decisions at this point — but we may not want to go back to those 10 million assets and actually digitize them all. It depends on what we find.”

Sinclair has worked with archiving vendor Memnon to digitize cutsheets and tape labels on stored media at a few stations. It plans to use AI tools like optical character recognition (OCR) to analyze them and hopefully generate good descriptions that it can then use to determine what is worth digitizing.

Fox Sports has spent several years on its own complex archive project with Google to create a system that allows producers to quickly call up old footage, such as to enhance a halftime package. Ramos said he has been given access to it and “playing with it for about six months.” The system uses two kinds of metadata: metadata created by human loggers, as well as metadata created by the same ML algorithms that form the basis of YouTube search. A user has a choice of searching by either type.

“It’s definitely working,” Ramos said. “It’s a massive, massive archive, it’s huge. They’ve got a lot of content in there, so it would be really hard to search otherwise.”

Ramos’ own budget for AI/ML tools is more modest, so his team has focused on the least expensive AI tools, speech-to-text and OCR, and runs content through the AI tools themselves.

“Usually when there’s an anchor or a reporter talking about something, it relates to the video that’s covering that,” Ramos said. “So that’s been a really good way for us to inexpensively find most of what we need. But it’s not 100% of the way there.”

Finding Affordability

French company Newsbridge wants to make indexing archive content and searching through it more affordable. The company has developed a cloud-based AI engine called MXT-1 that can quickly sift through archive video and generate human-like descriptions, and do it more affordably than conventional AI systems, said Newsbridge CEO Phillippe Petitpont. Its indexing technology can also be applied to ingesting live content.

“With 1,000 hours of archive, there might be three hours that are hidden gems that have a lot of value,” Petitpont said. “So, you need to analyze 1,000 hours but there are maybe only three or four that are relevant. The problem is that current AI, monomodal indexing technology is very expensive. You don’t want to spend $10 million to index something that might be valuable for just two or three hours. So, we took this problem and have been working on it for a few years. We need AI with video understanding that is able to be very efficient, so that it can meet business realities in terms of pricing.”

Petitpont said a key differentiator for Newsbridge’s AI that it is multimodal, which means that it doesn’t just analyze speech or recognize text but considers multiple types of data within video as a human would. And instead of analyzing each individual frame of video, MXT-1 employs “smart subsampling” and only looks at a few key relevant frames. This cuts down on the use of expensive graphics processing units (GPUs) on public cloud compute and avoids wasting money by “overindexing” content.

“We only process a frame that will really best illustrate the content,” Petitpont said. “So then we’ve reduced by an order of magnitude a lot of traditional sampling.”

Sinclair is not currently a customer of Newsbridge, but Palmer said when he spoke with them he was impressed by their smart subsampling approach. The company obviously had arrived earlier at the same conclusion that his team at Sinclair had reached.

“That was, that you don’t need to look at every frame of video,” Palmer said. “You don’t need to do some of these massive tagging things for every frame of video. Some of these AI models will create pages and pages of metadata for each frame of video, and that is not appropriate for news. Less in some cases, and probably this case, is better.”

Read more coverage of NewsTECHForum 2023 here. Watch this session and all the NewsTECHForum 2023 videos here.

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The new offering, which is integrated into more than 500 networks, services, MVPDs and platforms, comes as “changing business models, more complex deals and a continued wave of new content providers upend streaming market dynamics.”

As the streaming market matures, more content is being distributed to more platforms. Deals are often made on the fly, Synacor says, “with urgent rollout requirements. More content providers are entering the market with no prior experience navigating an increasingly splintered ecosystem. At the same time, security requirements are more pressing than ever, demanding SAML or OAuth integrations that can each take weeks or months to complete and require ongoing support and maintenance.

“This is further complicated by many providers not offering standard authentication endpoints, requiring custom API integrations. It is not uncommon for content providers to support a dozen or more platform integrations at a time, and some MVPDs or streaming TV providers must accommodate literally thousands of combinations of content provider apps and streaming platforms.”

Based on more than a decade of experience managing comprehensive authentication integrations for premium entertainment services, Cloud ID Media Connect delivers a “reliable, managed CIAM solution” that is now integrated with more than 500 content distributors, platforms and MVPDs, including AT&T, Comcast Xfinity, Charter Spectrum, DISH, Amazon Prime, MAX, Paramount+, Peacock, Sling TV, DirecTV Stream and YouTube TV.

Synacor says it has helped customers launch new services or meet the terms of new deals in as little as a couple weeks, “saving countless hours of integration time and eliminating the need for internal authentication expertise.”

Synacor Senior Vice President Dana Golden said: “A recurring theme in our recent customer meetings is heightened concerns about content security, recognition that authentication requirements are becoming overwhelming and a desire to move as quickly as possible to get content everywhere it needs to be. Cloud ID Media Connect immediately delivers several years of complex authentication integrations to support changing business requirements and get content in front of consumers as quickly as possible.”

Cloud ID Media Connect features end user capabilities like home-based authentication, Apple Single Sign-on with your TV Provider, device rendezvous solutions and more. Cloud ID Media Connect “seamlessly integrates with Cloud ID Passkey Connect, a managed service offering for passkey management, registration and authentication,” the company says.

Powered by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Cloud ID “provides a modern, custom and turnkey identity management platform for premium, globally renowned streaming entertainment, content and service provider companies, with use cases spanning traditional MVPDs, telcos, health care, hotels, airlines, rewards programs and more,” Synacor says.

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VideoVerse’s software as a service (SaaS) platform leverages artificial intelligence models, computer vision and machine learning to transform full-length video footage into short-form content and highlights in real-time for rights-holders and content creators.

VideoVerse says its flagship product, Magnifi, “streamlines traditional labor, time and cost-intensive editing processes through cloud-based AI-driven analysis, empowering hundreds of sports leagues, news and entertainment broadcasters, and streaming platforms around the world to quickly and easily curate, edit and distribute short-form content and highlights.” Earlier this year, Magnifi earned the National Association of Broadcasters Product of the Year award.

“With media companies and streamers now producing millions of hours of video every minute, demand for curated content has skyrocketed,” said Vinayak Shrivastav, VideoVerse CEO/co-founder. “VideoVerse’s editing solutions are now an indispensable asset within the video creation ecosystem, with Magnifi, in particular, facilitating a seamless and highly-efficient process for curation, production and distribution,” Shrivastav highlighted. “Our partnership with Bluestone marks an exciting phase as we forge ahead with global expansion, and driving innovation in the realm of media technology by unlocking the boundless potential of AI.”

“The demand for intelligent software automation of short-form content and highlights is growing exponentially,” said Bobby Sharma, Bluestone founder/managing partner. “The applications for VideoVerse’s technology are limitless, extending across Sports, Media and Entertainment, and into other industries, such as education and security. Today, rights-holders and content creators sit on mountains of raw content, and consumers want the ability to watch short-form content and highlights as soon as a play is over, or when news breaks. With Magnifi’s market-leading AI technology and a suite of supporting SaaS technologies, VideoVerse meets this demand in terms of quality and efficiency, unlike any other company in the marketplace. We’re excited to help VideoVerse take the next step on its journey to revolutionize the curation and monetization of next generation video and media.”

Headquartered in the United States and India, VideoVerse works with sports leagues and teams, broadcast networks and content producers including: the UEFA Champions League, FA Cup, Bundesliga, Australian Open, U.S. Open, Wimbledon, NCAA Basketball, Indian Premier League, Women’s Premier League and various U.S. collegiate sports programs at major universities and athletic conferences.

VideoVerse marks the third investment for Bluestone, and its first in a SaaS company.

The post Bluestone Equity Partners Invests In VideoVerse appeared first on TV News Check.

Here are the videos:

Adapting to a Climate of Continuous Crisis, the conference’s titular, opening panel, featured Barb Maushard, SVP of news, Hearst Television; Ellen Crooke, SVP of news, Tegna; Nora Zimmett, president, news and original series, The Weather Group; Sam Singal, group vice president of editorial and content, Spectrum Networks; and Joe DiGiovanni, head of North American Sales, The Weather Company. They discussed how they’re dealing with the recruitment and retention crisis, climate change coverage, navigating a growing trust crisis with viewers and how they’re readying to deal with generative AI.

Democracy, Technology, TV Journalism and the 2024 Election, the keynote panel, featured E.W. Scripps CEO and President Adam Symson and Connell McShane, an anchor at NewsNation. They discussed how their respective networks are looking to avoid the pitfalls faced by their major cable competition to chart a middle course and how to build a more durable model for news that, in turn, shores up an imperiled democracy.

Reassessing the Streaming News Content Strategy featured Sahand Sepehrnia, SVP, streaming, CBS News & Stations; Mike Braun, SVP, digital media, Gray Television; Jeff Zellmer, SVP digital operations, Fox Television Stations; Greg Morrow, GM of ViewNexa, Bitcentral; and Rick Young, SVP, head of global products, LTN. They shared that the volume and immediacy of viewer data on their streaming and FAST channels is allowing them to make programming decisions and iterations on the fly and the live content still winds with audiences over everything else.

Harvesting the Archive for New Content and Opportunities featured Ben Ramos, VP, Fox Archive, field and emerging tech, Fox News; Mike Palmer, AVP, advanced technology/media management, Sinclair Broadcast Group; Devon Armijo, director of digital news integration, Hearst Television; and Philippe Petitpont, CEO, Newsbridge. The panel looked at how AI is impacting the content retrieval and rights management elements of archives, and the steep challenges news organizations still face in getting a handle on what’s in their vaults.

Building the Architecture of More Collaborative Content Creation featured Lee Zurik, VP of investigations, Gray Television; Kate O’Brian, president, Scripps News, The E.W. Scripps Co.; Meredith McGinn, EVP, diginets & original production, NBCUniversal Local; Kengo Tsutsumi, partnerships editor, ProPublica; and Stephane Guez, co-founder & principal, Dalet. Panelists discussed the collaborative structures they’ve built both within their groups and with partner organizations, the technology that’s helping to realize the complex projects they’re undertaking and how such collaborative ways of working will be essential to newsgroup’s survival in a rapidly changing age for journalism.

Agility in News Production featured Ernie Ensign, AVP, news technology and operations, Sinclair; Steve Fastook, SVP of technical and commercial operations, CNBC; Clint Moore, director of broadcast operations, Gray Television; and Erik Smith, VP of news operations and technology, Fox Television Stations. The group looked at how broadcasters are striving for more efficiency in all aspects of news production including studio presentation, newsroom workflows and field operations. Flexibility and speed, they stressed, are key drivers for any implementation of new technology.

Chasing AI: Threatening or Enhancing the News? featured Laura Ellis, head of technology forecasting, BBC; Aimee Rinehart, senior product manager, AI strategy, the Associated Press; Santiago Lyon, head of advocacy & education, Content Authenticity Initiative, Adobe; Claire Leibowicz, head of AI and media integrity, Partnership on AI; and Ray Thompson, senior director, partners and alliances, Avid. The group laid out the most pressing issues around generative AI that news organizations will need to triage, including its weaponization for disinformation, how it will complicate already thorny trust issues and the ethical considerations that come with its adoption and labeling of its usage for viewers.

Fireside Chat Sponsored Sessions

AI and the Future of Broadcast Workflows

There’s lots of talk about AI in media, but what is likely to be the actual impact on TV production workflows? Ray Thompson, senior director partners and alliances, Avid Technology, talks about how AI is increasing workflow efficiency and will soon expedite content delivery.

News: The Last Frontier for AR and Virtual Sets

Widely used in sports programming, augmented reality and virtual sets are making their way into news programming, thanks to photo realism and other technologies that have ramped up quality. David Rodriguez  Moldes, director of product at Brainstorm, talks about how AR and virtual sets are affecting news storytelling and expanding companies’ ability to go beyond the news into magazines and other formats.

The post NewsTECHForum: The Complete Videos appeared first on TV News Check.

There’s good reason for TV stations to be focused on free ad-supported television (FAST) channels and other digital platforms — they have become a rapidly growing business.

“In the aggregate, FAST channels have generated $7.3 billion this year and that’s projected to grow to $34 billion in 2027 amidst a rising tide of consumer usage and a rising tide of monetization that’s complementary to local,” said Greg Morrow, GM of ViewNexa by BitCentral.

“The numbers for FAST for news content are off the charts,” said Rick Young, SVP, head of global products, LTN. “The numbers show that half the FAST channels out there are news and half of the viewing time [on those channels] is news. That’s massive. And the more real-time, the more live the content is on those channels, the more demographics that you want will find them, whether they are male or younger.”

While CBS started implementing FAST and digital streaming in 2014, it’s only been within the last three-to-five years that most local station groups have gotten their live-streaming operations off the ground with services such as Fox’s LiveNow, Gray’s Local News Live and CBS’ local news apps. The relative newness of these services means that they are still in experimental and iterative phases.

“We look at the minute-by-minute concurrence when we’re evaluating the success of the streams,” said Sahand Sepehrina, SVP, streaming, CBS News & Stations. “We see that the local audience comes in about one to one half hours earlier than the national audience. Because of that, we have invested heavily in mornings. Now we have nearly 100 hours of live newscasts that are streaming exclusively in the mornings. We’ve seen that drive new audiences so as we’re starting to look at other day parts, we’re getting a lot smarter about what content we invest in.”

Viewers tend to turn to live streaming news when big events are happening. The longer the events go on, the more viewers tune in and stick around, stations are finding.

“We have found that live events really start to pick up an audience after the first hour. When we invested in live events that ran an hour to two hours, the ROI wasn’t nearly as strong as live events that were much longer,” Sepehrina said.

Gray launched its Local News Live product out of Omaha, Neb., in 2020 and then moved it to Washington, D.C. The group quickly realized that it needed to be live and streaming as much as possible and that there’s an appetite for local news coverage, even for people who don’t live in that market.

“We always want to be live. Our research and traffic have shown that engagement was so high when we were live that we really never want to go dark,” said Mike Braun, SVP, digital media, Gray Television.

In addition, viewers are more interested in watching stories from other markets than Gray expected: “It’s not only where you are, it’s where you’ve been and where you are going,” Braun said.

Three live-streaming strategies that BitCentral’s Morrow has found to be successful for local stations are first, to put up weather and traffic cameras that viewers return to often.

Second, stations are seeing success programming “hyperlocal” sports, such as high school, junior college and local second-tier professional leagues.

“The most successful thing we’ve seen on that front is working with the state associations on state championships, which are concentrated tournaments that take place over a period of days in sports like hockey and football,” Morrow said. “These get huge amounts of traffic and there are sponsorship opportunities. We are talking live content with huge tune-in times. People tune in all day long to watch, and it draws audiences outside of the local community.”

Third is programming a host-driven, vlogging style of content, like viewers find on TikTok or YouTube Shorts, which is something the Fox Television Stations have done both on their local-news streams and on their streaming news service, LiveNow. LiveNow has digital journalists, or DJs, who create their own content on the fly, although they are supported by producers.

“They choose the shots, they talk about the content as it’s happening, they are just constantly just managing everything,” said Jeff Zellmer, SVP, digital operations, Fox Television Stations. “They have to have that passion, they have to have that stamina, but they also feel really empowered.”

Allowing talent to stay in constant touch with the audience creates a relationship that keeps viewers coming back.

“This is about having a dialogue with the audience about local issues,” Morrow said. “We saw when a station added that component to their local broadcast, they saw lift, engagement and recurring tune-in.”

That tune-in extends past the typical local news audience of older adults to younger millennial and Gen-Z consumers.

“What we are finding in the digital or FAST world is that the audience is younger and more male-skewing than we might have imagined,” said LTN’s Young.

Another advantage of live streaming is that journalists can spend as much or as little time as they want on certain topics.

“There’s the freedom to talk for 10 minutes if there’s a reason to do that. Journalists are eager to talk about things they didn’t cover in a one-minute package,” Zellmer said. “We are watching the data constantly. We absolutely pay attention to the viewer. We wouldn’t be doing what we are doing if we didn’t see that it was growing over time.”

Fox is not only watching the data closely — it’s allowing viewers to watch closely as well. LiveNow includes a graphic in the left corner that tracks how many people are watching at any given time. “It gives the DJ immediate feedback of whether people are interested in what he or she is doing,” Zellmer said.

It’s all leading to a time in the not-too-distant future, where TV stations’ linear and digital offerings are all just one part of a larger content offering and aren’t considered to be distinct products, Young said.

“It’s no longer a world of traditional versus digital,” he added. “The audience is everywhere. The numbers are equal in terms of engagement and new opportunities on old and new platforms. It’s a ‘yes and’ strategy for everybody now going forward.”

Read more coverage of NewsTECHForum 2023 here.

Watch this session and all the NewsTECHForum 2023 videos here.

The post Stations’ Streaming News Strategies Are Literally Evolving By The Minute appeared first on TV News Check.

As the first generation born into a fully digital world, this age group according to a new global study is no longer interested in traditional news formats where dynamic on-screen graphics are underutilized.

The research shows a stark shift to social-first content formats, with the majority of Gen Z now opting to consume news on social media; with Instagram (60%), TikTok (38%) and Facebook (38%) identified as the most popular sources for keeping up to date with news and current affairs.

The intensity of news cycles, volume of negative stories and a growing loyalty in social first news brands are also broadly cited as reasons behind the significant shift in viewing habits.

Ulrich Voigt, Vizrt global head of product management, said: “Our research highlights the importance of real-time data and on-screen graphics in retaining Gen Z and futureproofing newsroom content creation. Content creators, traditional broadcasters and newer online news outfits, must adapt to meet the evolving needs of news consumers as each generation becomes more digitally advanced. Immersive storytelling with AR and XR can quickly and easily break down barriers to news accessibility and drive audience engagement.”

On-Screen Graphics Considered Essential For Broadcasters 

The global report of thousands of U.K. and U.S. respondents commissioned by Vizrt examined how Gen Z consumes news in comparison to other generations and revealed a significant reliance on on-screen graphics among the younger generation.

Gen Z is twice as likely to pay attention to content with on-screen graphics in comparison to other generations (31% vs 14% average of other generations), helping them to understand complex stories (51% Gen Z vs 42% average) read data clearly (48% Gen Z vs 46% average), and receive additional information not otherwise shown on screen (54% Gen Z vs 50% average).

Gen Z Demands Social-First Formats   

Despite Gen Z opting to consume news content on their phones, broadcasters are yet to adapt to meet their digital needs.

Over half (56%) of those aged 18-25 find it challenging to watch content in this format due to horizontal content not being adapted for vertical viewing.

Another issue faced by almost half of respondents (45%) is the lack of on-screen graphics when watching content on the go.

Vizrt reveals its research on the newsroom consumption habits of Gen Z and millennials after sharing research on the changing viewer habits of Gen Z and millennial sports fans earlier this year.

The main findings of both studies “prove that social media consumption via mobile phones is on the rise, and attentions are won over with engaging visual graphics regardless of demographic, whether it is news or sports,” Vizrt said.

To read the full results of the future of the newsroom study, click here.

The post Broadcasters Must Adapt Quickly To Keep Gen Z Engaged In News: Study appeared first on TV News Check.

Content sharing works the other way at Scripps, too, with Scripps News also airing local stories with the potential for national interest. Local political reporters are working with journalists on the national beat, and Scripps is facilitating similar relationships between investigative reporters across the station group as well.

“What we have to do … is to work with the internal partners and external partners to create the best product for our viewer,” said Kate O’Brian, president of Scripps News, at TVNewsCheck’s NewsTechForum. “The most important glue that makes it stick is to have dedicated teams who are responsible for sharing the information with each other, sitting over the whole and communicating.”

In times of slim margins and expanding channels, efficiency is the primary key to content production, with collaboration like that on display at Scripps — so widespread and integrated into the culture — optimizing it.

Scripps is not the only station group adopting a hyper-collaborative approach between personnel across its entire network.

During the panel “Building the Architecture of More Collaborative Content Creation,” moderator and TVNewsCheck Editor Michael Depp highlighted similar efforts in other station groups. At NBCUniversal Local, multiple Telemundo newsrooms help build regional FAST channel programming in the Northeast, Florida and Texas, while Gray’s investigative reporters across the country work together to build programming for InvestigateTV, a national reporting initiative and show.

“Knowing that we wanted to produce more live original newscasts on a daily basis without completely taxing the teams, we came up with the idea of leveraging the multiple markets,” said Meredith McGinn, EVP of diginets and original production at NBCUniversal Local. “One market will run the control room and anchor the show; another market will build the second block, and other markets the third block, and other markets the fourth block. And what we’re seeing now on these Telemundo, regional FAST channels: those newscasts are the most engaged shows of the day.”

Lee Zurik, VP of investigations at Gray, said his company’s mission of getting ambitious, enterprising reportage to viewers by any means necessary was hatched in response to consumer demand.

“We know by the research that there is an appetite for this, and we need to do this to be good watchdogs in our community,” Zurik said. “We really looked at a way to leverage what we have as a company, so we added this national investigative unit that does investigations across the country, and we share them with all of our stations.”

Cross-station collaboration of this magnitude would not be possible without recent advancements in technology. McGinn cited the now ubiquity of Slack and Microsoft Teams, two platforms that newsrooms have become more familiar with since the pandemic made in-person collaboration dangerous, cutting down the “email clutter” as well as the need for daily all-hands meetings, without compromising communication flow. “It’s enabled us to go from teams of three or five people in the market to hundreds across the division,” McGinn added.

There are other reliable tools boosting newsroom collaboration that are much more sophisticated than that pair, too. Companies like Dalet have developed a series of tools in this space, utilizing cloud and AI tech to make collaboration more seamless, across virtual newsrooms.

“It used to be in the newsroom, there was a sort of very rigid division of labor: you’re editing content, you do just that; on the editorial side, you work with scripts,” said Stephane Guez, co-founder and principal of Dalet. “Today, it makes no sense. If you’re going to produce for all sorts of different digital platforms, everybody is going to want to be much more involved in all aspects of the news making. What we as a company are trying to do — in terms of what type of news production systems we are building — it’s really to make it possible, to make this collaboration more effective between people in different roles, between stations, between different groups in different teams.”

Even collaboration across entities that could be considered competitors is happening. Decision makers at the digital news outfit ProPublica are taking a high-tide-raises-all-boats approach, working with Gray and Scripps on investigative stories for their TV stations this past year.

“We write 10,000-word stories for…what I like to call what I like to call ‘the tote bag audience,’ the New Yorker audience, and we hit them quite well,” said Kengo Tsutsumi, partnerships editor at ProPublica. But partnering with the likes of Gray and Scripps gives ProPublica a chance to reach an even broader audience, particularly those in Middle America, he said.

In his remarks on the panel, Tsutsumi provided behind-the-scenes details on the collaboration between ProPublica and Gray that generated a special report about blocked train crossings in Indiana. It includes footage of young children who are forced to climb over, under and between stopped train cars that could move again at any time while on their way to school.

ProPublica reporters discovered the problem, but it was the production of video footage exhibiting the danger the kids were encountering daily that made a TV-publisher partnership obvious and necessary for the story to be served best. It also led to an interview with U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, and Zurik said legislators are reportedly taking action to create safer passage for children in affected communities because of the story’s reach.

“ProPublica, we would have never done something like that, something so punk rock,” Tsutsumi said, referring to the guerilla filmmaking executed by Gray. “But of course, it ends up back in our 10,000-word print story [and] it changed it into something that was a better print, digital product. We use their footage and so everyone in the newsroom could see this is what happens if you expand and collaborate.”

In closing, Depp asked the panel, “Do we have to be more collaborative now in order to survive and be relevant to news consumers in this upcoming year?”

“Absolutely,” O’Brian said. “If we’re not collaborating with each other, if we’re not utilizing the IP, utilizing all the know-how across all the different parts of our organization, then we’re wasting it.”

“It’s not necessary, it’s essential,” Zurik said. “With technology, it is easier now to collaborate than ever before. It’s essential to our mission as journalists and quite frankly, it’s essential for us, for survival in the industry.”

Read more coverage of NewsTECHForum 2023 here.

Watch this session and all the NewsTECHForum 2023 videos here.

The post Collaborations Now Essential For Survival, News Leaders Say appeared first on TV News Check.

“The AURO-CX Codec, designed for streaming but with applications in broadcast, has many advantages over existing Next Generation Audio codecs that make it desirable to the universe of content creators, content distributors, streaming services, and audio manufacturers,” said a company press release. “All these advantages are rooted in the codec’s inherent scalability, which means less storage space and fewer encoding passes, both of which save considerable time, manpower, and costs.”

AURO-CX enables scalable quality, the company said, meaning a variety of resolutions — from lossless to transparent to lossy — are included within a single bitstream thanks to multiple audio waveform coding techniques. Similarly, AURO-CX has scalable sample rates that allow a single bitstream to carry 48, 96, and 192kHz, giving the decoder the option to extract only what it needs from a single encode, depending on its capabilities.

“Thanks to AURO-CX’s scalable quality, content distributors have the flexibility to address multiple audiences using the same stream. A single stream can include high-res immersive audio for the audiophile community and lower bitrate mixes for a wider consumer audience,” says Bert Van Daele, CTO of NEWAURO B.V. “Because AURO-CX is scalable, it is attractive to streaming services, which can make a single stream upgradeable for premium services. This is a powerful technology.”

AURO-CX also has the flexibility to transmit objects embedded in the same bitstream for immersive audio, according to the company. “Other formats have to extract objects from 7.1, resulting in a big reduction in audio quality, especially for the height channels in an immersive audio setup,” says Van Daele. “AURO does it differently. We embed objects in 13.1 immersive so that the user’s 7.1 experience is more 3D due to higher-quality height information, allowing the mix to stay true to the artist’s intent and deliver to the end user what was heard in the studio.”

In addition, AURO-CX supports a wide range of flexible broadcast features such as dialogue enhancement and localized audio for multiple languages. It also enables interactive and assistive audio, where the quality of the immersive experience can be set higher than the additional audio tracks, guaranteeing the best immersive experience while providing better access to all.

To learn more about AURO-CX, demo the technology at CES 2024 at The Venetian, visit www.auro-3d.com, or contact sales@auro-3d.com.

The post AURO Will Demonstrate Scalable Next Generation Audio Codec, AURO-CX, At CES 2024 appeared first on TV News Check.

Ray Thompson, senior director of partners and alliances at Avid, said AI’s assistance with transcript creation has already proven valuable. Not only does it construct word-for-word transcripts, but it also produces summaries of interviews, allowing TV news producers to make quicker decisions about which portions of the footage to use in stories. Thompson added that the tech can then churn out a new transcript for a finished package, locate where key phrases were said within it and drop permanent markers onto it to aid in searches. He also said that Avid recently added a “mix searches” feature to its MediaCentral platform, allowing users to combine metadata and phonetic searches into one. 

“It’s driving efficiencies,” said Thompson about gen AI. “It’s basically making things go faster, and hopefully allowing you to … deliver more content and deliver at scale and do so much faster.”

From the publisher’s perspective, Aimee Rinehart, senior project manager for AI strategy at the Associated Press, said that her organization has leveraged AI for nearly a decade. Starting in 2014, the AP used the tech to build earnings reports, growing the number of reports that year tenfold, from 300 (written by humans) to 3,000. 

“There was actually a white paper that indicated that there was an uptick in the stock market around the time those were released because there were 2,700 companies that had never been written about and suddenly they had some visibility,” Rinehart recalled. “So those continue to run today and we’ll keep experimenting around workflow efficiencies.”

Over at the BBC, Laura Ellis, the company’s head of technology forecasting, said the company is using generative AI for “lots of language work translation, transcription and personalization.” She said the tech is helping dyslexic workers at the company write more quickly, and it’s also being used to generate story headlines — with human oversight.

Ellis went so far as to say that the BBC is “a technology organization as well as a content organization,” one that is not “cutting humans out of the loop.” However, she also noted that the company is not blind to the potential pitfalls of AI. 

“We’re now trying to work out how all these new capabilities [help us] can create new things, new products for our audience, and how we can do that ethically and safely, because if we lose trust with our audiences, we lose everything,” Ellis said. “Generative AI has its moments and has its foibles, so [we’re] just trying to create a cross organization conversation about where we want to go with it, what we want to do with it, and how we do that safely.”

Adobe is one organization trying to figure out ways to help newsgroups navigate this minefield. Also sitting on the panel was Santiago Lyon, head of advocacy and education content for the Authenticity Initiative at Adobe, who said the effort he oversees involves a “community of over 2,000 media and technology companies and others, working to set and implement an open standard around provenance,” referring to the origin of digital files and the tracking of potential manipulation. Such information, Lyon said, can be shared with viewers, boosting transparency about the content in front of them.

“You can think about it sort of like a digital nutrition label, in the same way that you might look at a food product in the supermarket and understand what’s in it,” Lyon said. “We’re also doing this work with hardware manufacturers, so it’s already in production cameras out there, working with smartphone manufacturers working with editing tools, working with publishers and CMS manufacturers, and the whole initiative [is] underwritten by Adobe and [the tech] is incorporated into Adobe products.”

Claire Leibowicz, head of AI and media integrity at the Partnership on AI, a nonprofit coalition committed to the responsible use of artificial intelligence, said that there will certainly be “unintended consequences” with greater deployment of gen AI in journalism. However, her group is working on guidelines for AI use in newsrooms to help address related issues. It includes suggestions for newsroom leaders about how to approach AI integration, what problems to look out for and how to talk to production teams about its use. 

“Journalistic standards are the helpful conduit to making a decision about what you disclose,” Leibowicz said. “What do you have as a starting place in terms of journalistic ethics about what requires a correction or what requires explanation of methods? … There’s certain precedent that we do have on our side to help us in the AI moment, in the sense of what we do in terms of disclosure.”

Another ongoing effort is in place to generate guidelines for generative AI tech use and transparency associated with it. Lyon said that literature from the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) has emerged as a “best-in-class” standard for such guidance. He advocated for its use in newsrooms, saying it is even consulted by legislators charged with building policy on the matter. 

But in-house discourse among publishers and other decision makers will only be impactful if consumers understand gen AI and what role it plays in content production. “We’ve done a fair amount of research and consumers get confused quite quickly, depending on the demographic, as to what they are looking at, what is being conveyed,” Lyon said. “So you’re trying to find that balance to simplify it and make it effective.”

Consumers are also going to have to learn to trust gen AI. Leibowicz cited an Axios poll that said half of Americans believe AI will be used to create content that will impact the upcoming presidential election. 

“If you’re implementing AI in your newsroom, that’s amidst an ecosystem of public literacy that AI is kind of going to be infused in all types of content,” she said. “So this question of, what responsibility do you have to both meet people where they are in terms of thinking that most content is AI generated to date, but also not to induce a degree of skepticism, that’s going to make an already distrusting population more distrusting of the news media — and there’s no perfect answer.”

According to research, Leibowicz said that consumers don’t just want a label that says news producers use AI, they want to understand where it is being used and what it is being used for. “There’s even a question of how noticeable they are” in broadcasts, she added. “That’s a design consideration more so than it is a linguistic one, but you want to make sure people can see these things.”

On top of all that, news stakeholders and consumers have varying perspectives on the threshold for conveying disclosures of AI use, Leibowicz said. Some people might want to know whether or not a writer used Google to generate some ideas for headlines, while others might not think it crucial at all.

Education initiatives can’t arrive quickly enough. Not only is AI already used in newsrooms on a growing scale, it’s also relied upon in spaces covered by journalists, creating yet another impetus to stay in lockstep with the tech.

Reinhart said, “If you live in a town with a bank or school or a police bureau, chances are they’re using some type of algorithm to determine where they do arrests, or how many people are going to graduate,” as well as other data that informs policy. She said local reporters should ask community leaders what is being used and how, and noted the Tampa Bay Times recently won a Pulitzer Prize for a story about a sheriff executing preemptive policing based on AI forecasting. 

“So, AI is happening at your level, no matter what happens in Silicon Valley,” Reinhart said.

Read more coverage of NewsTECHForum 2023 here.

Watch this session and all the NewsTECHForum 2023 videos here.

The post Gen AI Will Transform News. Experts Say The Rulebook Must Be Written Now appeared first on TV News Check.

In this Talking TV conversation, TVNewsCheck Editor Michael Depp and Editor at Large Harry Jessell take a wide-ranging look at the year just wrapping up and the one ahead, and what’s on the line for broadcasters as it comes.

Episode transcript below, edited for clarity.

Michael Depp: We’ve come to the end of a pretty volatile year for broadcasters, and it might fairly be said, an annus horribilis for us all. So, it’s probably a good time to take stock of some of the major events that have faced broadcasters in 2023 and look ahead to what is most likely to impact the industry in 2024.

I’m Michael Depp, editor of TVNewsCheck, and this is Talking TV, our weekly video podcast. This week, I’m joined by Harry Jessell, our beloved editor at large, and we’re going to talk about the health of the industry generally as it goes into the next year, the hope for regulatory relief, the prospects being ushered in by generative AI, 2024 election coverage and much, much more. We will be right back with that year-end conversation.

Harry Jessell: Good to see you, Michael. How are you?

It’s good to see you. I’m well, thanks. And it’s good to see you. You are the only person I’d want to wrap the year up with and look ahead to…

I think I’m the only person qualified to do that.

The only man standing on this planet who can do it. Exactly. Exactly. So, let’s play a little ghosts of Christmas past, and then ghost of Christmas future. And let’s start with the past, the year behind us. A lot of things going on. One of those things that might tell us something to sum up the year’s health of the industry, are stock prices.

Well, yeah, I thought, you know, there’s a lot of ways to measure an industry and we have some big public companies, so I thought I’d take a look at the stock prices and see how we did this year. First of all, the Dow is up 10%. The S&P was up 20%. So, it must have been a good year for the TV stocks. No, they were all down: 3%, 7%, 5%, 3%. Nexstar took a big hit, 32 points [Ed. note: Since this was recorded, Nexstar’s stock rebounded to 155 on Thursday]. But it was a high-flier. It started the year 174 and is down to 142, which is sort of a shame because Nexstar, the group, I think is really trying to do some things. And maybe we can talk about that a little bit later on with the CW and the NewsNation.

So, not a great year if you believe Wall Street. But I will say they’re doing better than radio. There’s a couple radio groups now that are selling for under a dollar.

Yeah, I don’t know, I mean, radio is a pretty low bar relatively speaking, but we have had a lot of headwinds this year. I mean, you know, just generally, advertising, the spot ad market was really challenged for a lot of this year. It wasn’t a political year. Of course, they’re looking at one next year and have a lot of hope with regards to a rebound there.

Well yeah, you know, that’s the nature of this business. And I think the number was that we got from Steve Passwaiter was $10 billion, of which broadcasters will get the lion’s share. So, that’s going to be a big hit for broadcasters and positive hit. They have that to look forward to as well as the challenge of covering those elections.

Yes, which we will come to. Let’s talk a little bit about the M&A year that wasn’t, in many ways, starting with Tegna.

Well, yeah. Well, this business is so heavily consolidated now that there’s not much room for mergers and acquisitions anymore. And the one big deal was cratered by the FCC and Jessica Rosenworcel, she torpedoed that deal crushing Soo Kim’s opportunity to make another big score in broadcasting and I think may have chased off some private equity money and hedge funds that might have been looking at broadcasting and their big cash flows that come, and she sort of sent a signal that you’re not wanted here in broadcasting. She’s a traditional Democrat, isn’t looking for more consolidation in this industry. So, that was sort of a negative for the industry, I think, overall.

Yeah, absolutely. But then we also have perhaps ABC on the sales block.

Well, yes, that was the story that never happened. In July, Bob Iger decides… I think the comment was like, his linear channels may not be core to the business, which a lot of people took as a sign that he was ready to divest ABC and ESPN maybe and his minor or smaller cable networks. And everybody got excited for a while. I saw numbers for ABC at $5 billion up. But you know, just a couple of weeks ago he sort of walks it back and says, you know, really, I was just really gassing, never mind, we believe in the future of linear TV. Maybe that means he does believe in linear TV. Maybe he just stirred up no interest in those networks.

Well, Byron Allen shot his hand up and Nexstar seemed to be sniffing around.

Nextstar, I think is definitely, and Byron is always sticking his hand up in the air. He’s an ambitious man. One of these days he’s going to make a big score, I think.

This would be a big one for him.

So, that never materialized. Maybe let’s put a positive spin on that. Let’s say this is Disney recognizing once again that linear TV is core, is important for maybe creating shows that they can sell downstream. So, let’s take it as a positive.

And of course, people at ABC are pretty nervous, though. I don’t think anybody feels like they’re standing on terra firma right now.

Well, probably not a good idea if you’re in the broadcasting business.

Harry, there was another big story this year with Disney and Charter.

Well, I was just going to say, the other sort of endorsement of the linear TV idea was that Disney and Charter, after coming to loggerheads in September or late August over a new carriage deal. It looked like that would go bad. It looked like Charter might walk away, but they didn’t. They were able to cut a deal for the ABC stations and more, and ESPN, and they got Monday Night Football up there.

And so, all was well, that was sort of a short-lived crisis. And had they not done that deal, that may have had repercussions for other broadcasters trying to cut new retrans deals. And so, I think for the time being, it’s secure, the idea the retrans will continue to come in. We have another year or two anyway of business as normal.

Sigh of relief.

Sigh of relief.

Another issue this year that was substantial, still unfolding really, is around the FCC and the virtual MVPDs, and that kind of fostered a bit of a schism inside of the broadcast world.

Well, yeah. Network versus affiliate the old, they’ve always been at odds, more prominently at some times than at others. But the real story there is, again, Rosenworcel has decided that she will not save broadcasters and allow them to deal directly with the virtual MVPDs, which are becoming a big part of the ecosystem now. That they will have to work through the networks, and when the networks make those deals with the virtual MVPDs, the affiliates always end up on the short end. So, that was a blow.

And it’s like Rosenworcel, like a lot of people, they say they love localism, but she doesn’t do a whole lot to help localism by supporting TV stations. I think she thinks she’s doing good by disallowing duopolies. I saw that was in the news again this week. NAB is making another run to persuade the FCC to allow network affiliates in the same market to own each other, you know, common ownership of two network affiliates. She’s not a fan of that. She’s turned down deals like that or rejected deals like that. That’s something she could do. You know, giving affiliates the right to negotiate directly with the MVPDs would have been nice…

Doesn’t roll off the tongue, does it, Harry?

Now we need another term. Can we come up with another term for that?

Yeah, I’ll work on that.

But what is clear, what is crystal clear, is she wants to help, maybe. But she doesn’t quite know how to. We’ll put it like that.

Well, one of the things I suppose you could say that that she did do to help, at least nominally, was a task force that was announced on ATSC 3.0, back in April, I believe it was, at the NAB Show, to kind of kick start that along, get that moving a little bit further. Doesn’t seem to have been a great year for NextGen TV, though, has it?

Well, it continues to bump along. Every so often you’ll see that they have announced another market, but I have yet to see a real plan for generating some revenue, creating a business either through enhanced television or through datacasting. I think the fact that LG, one of the big TV manufacturers, decided to take a pause in the marketing of NextGen sets was not good news.

Under litigation. So, it wasn’t maybe a voluntary pause, but nevertheless.

Yeah.

Just to say they were the biggest boosters in the OEM world for this technology. They were the ones kind of sticking their neck out the furthest. There was a lot of ambivalence with a lot of other set manufacturers.

Well, we’ll see what happens at the Consumer Electronics Show. But, you know, frankly, I don’t think that’s… I think it’s more of a datacasting business. I think that’s the way it’s going to go. And in even in that space, there’s another competitive transmission system out there. Got 5G, you know, uses the same transmission system they’re using for the phones, there’s a faction of the LPTV industry that’s sort of pushing this idea. So, then the ATSC proponents have to deal with that now, that somebody else is after that spectrum.

They’ve definitely thrown some cold water on that. But I do know that that some of the other the non-Sinclair broadcasters are trying some experiments with datacasting that they’ve kind of been keeping a lid on. I think some companies are just trying to manage expectations around this that it’s not going to be a panacea.

But you know, what’s interesting, when I talk to general managers, these are some of the people who are the most John the Baptist about the potential. They really do believe something is coming that will be transformative, mainly in terms of like addressable advertising in many ways. And it’s odd because that sort of dropped out of the national conversation. Certainly, it’s not leading the salient characteristics of ATSC 3.0 when we’re talking about it in a broader sense. So, they still believe, even if the faith has perhaps been challenged.

Well, as Mark Aitken is always telling me, keep the faith.

OK, well, there it is. So Nexstar, we touched on that before and they’ve had an interesting year with their national network endeavors. One of them being the CW, which underwent a pretty significant reboot this year.

Well, my Nexstar or my CW story is: I was at a New Jersey beach in September wondering how I was going to watch the West Virginia/Pitt football game, and I was surprised to find it on the CW. I guess they have an ACC package. I should have known that, but they do, and so I was able to watch that game sitting in a beach resort in New Jersey. I guess out of Philadelphia, it was. But I think that’s the right strategy, I mean they’re really heavy into sports. They did a wrestling thing also.

So, yeah, I think that’s a wise way to go. I hope they can make it. I know they’re investing heavily in it. At least Nexstar has sort of a growth strategy and maybe that’s why their stock is trading so much higher than their peers. Also, I listed this the year that Scripps came out and started talking about scooping up some local sports, and we’ve seen some of that.

Yeah, not only Scripps, Gray is on their heels, other groups are getting in there and definitely a lot of sports deals were announced. It wasn’t a plethora, but there was so much flux in that space, and it continues to be really, a lot of the teams in various leagues wanted to develop direct to consumer products for streaming so they can be sure to reach their fans. But they were convinced in many cases that broadcast is a value to them.

You know, it was years ago when I was growing up, you could watch baseball, hockey, basketball on broadcast TV or fairly frequently, boxing. All of that went away, by and large. And so, you know, those were fan recruitment devices. Those are tools for that, and I think they’re seeing the wisdom of that. And so, you get these 30-game packages that are popping up around the country with different teams and they seem to be good deals, or at least the teams are willing to try it out and see how it works.

Well, I hope we see more of them. You seem to have tracked it more closely than I. I’ve seen a few, but I’d like to see, you know, what do I know about sports marketing? But here in Pittsburgh, to do 25 or 30 games on broadcast TV and remind the people that have abandoned, the cord cutters, that we still have baseball here in Pittsburgh seems to me like a no brainer. I’d like to see it. I think it certainly would be a great thing for broadcasters if they could make that not as a loss leader, but as a real source of profit.

Yeah, well, Scripps is certainly the most bullish in that area, but Gray isn’t far behind them. And I think every group is taking this. Sinclair is trying to get back into that game a little bit and do some deals, and I think most groups are at least considering the possibility.

I think if Sinclair never saw another sports program again, they’d be happy.

Well, perhaps.

Their venture into sports has not been a good one so far.

No, but that story isn’t done being written yet.

OK, keep the faith, keep the faith.

That’s right. That’ll be the mantra.

That’s our theme.

Absolutely. And then just lastly, with Nexstar, NewsNation has another year behind it. Now they’ve got a presidential Republican debate that they have hosted. Are they, do you think, moving closer to viability, acceptability, with viewers?

I haven’t looked at the numbers, but I was sitting in a Chinese restaurant, and they could have had any TV station going on. Any TV station, there’s 10,000 of them and they had NewsNation. They must be doing something right. I think having that Republican debate on, which for some odd reason, I’ve been enjoying those debates. You know why? Because they’re talking policy. If they’re talking real policy, they’re talking about fixing things. There’s something normal about them. But I thought, I thought that was sort of a feather in their cap. It gave them a little status. If they were one of the big boys. I think it’s a very polished network.

It is.

No nonsense, very polished. They’ve done a nice job.

That’s Christmas past Let’s look to Christmas future 2024. There are a few things I want to bring up. Just the things that I’m watching and dynamics that will be kind of obviously important for the next year. One of them is the FAST channel phenomenon, which has become wildly, explosively popular with broadcasters. All of them, I think, at this point realize or already have FAST channels that they’re putting in various places, on the MVPDs, on the apps that are sponsored by the OEMs. Most of them have a strategy of ubiquity and putting them in as many places as possible. It’s a sort of easy-to-understand, intuitive business. It’s linear TV streaming, simply no VOD menu.

But it is an area that also, interestingly, where there’s a lot of change already happening. It used to be, you buy a smart television, you open up the app with all the FAST channels inside and you’d see a lot of library content stuff that was just kind of thrown at the wall to see what works. We are past that phase now.

We’re in the culling phase and the reorganization, redistribution of where FAST channels sit in those ecosystems. And it’s definitely turning out to be the case that they have to really think about, anybody putting one of these channels out, has to think about programing. It can’t just be some afterthought or just wheels that are running in endless circles that the OEMs and other more prized real estate wants to see original programing. They want to see dynamism, they want to see live. And so, it would seem that every broadcast group right now, needs –  

When you say, OEM, what are we talking about?

The set manufacturers, so the LGs, the Samsungs, anybody’s who’s got… and every TV basically now is a smart TV and it’s starting to come with loads of, you know, hundreds of FAST channels. But if you want to have a good place in that channel lineup, then you’ve got to have good stuff there. So, there can’t be any passivity about the programing. I think we’re going to go into this interesting year of prioritizing that platform and what it can do and just being much more active.

I have to tell you, when I turn on my TV, I look at, you know, I use Roku, when I look at those, you know, I can go down search channels and it’s just the clutter of stuff. And, you know, sometimes you see something that you might think is interesting. You go in there, it’s second-rate stuff. It looks like a lot of clutter.

It’s got a diginet-y kind of quality to it, sometimes in the worst sense of the diginet. But again, that’s you know, that stuff is getting stale. And it was sort of placeholder material in the FAST ecosystem. And now we’re moving into this more, I hate to use the word, but curated kind of sensibility about those channels.

Well, here’s what I want to know is what am I going to do with all these pay streams that I’m paying for I can’t keep paying them for. I think I’ve you know, they’re sort of like barnacles. You go through, I just collect them. I don’t think there’s, I’ve got them all and I got to do something. Can we cut to the consolidation phase?

Bundling. Well, the consolidation phase is happening for sure. But before that we’re going to see the bundling phase. And that word has already been thrown out by a few executives just in the last couple of weeks. It is coming. I think Apple TV and Paramount are talking about bundling and there are others that are under consideration right now. Bundling is going to happen, as people predicted years ago, the a la carte nature of streaming and buying streaming services has become onerously expensive, just on par with what people were paying for their cable bills. And so, what’s the value proposition really there? We’re going to see some culling of the herd. We’re going to see some bundling. There’s just going to be endless volatility in that space. So, you know, keep watching.

I guess the story is that none of these things are particularly profitable right now.

No.

No, they are not.

Well, many of them are. You know, Netflix tends to, by and large, to be pretty successful, but you have to have a massive, massive library. And that bundling is right. Even when you have a big library with lots of good titles, it’s got to be super enormous to really sustain. Of course, having all that programing costs a lot of money. The technology itself costs a ton of money and people don’t realize, they think it all just wafts in the cloud. There are server farms and massive infrastructure costs to running these things. And so, these were not small businesses that were quick to get off the ground and inexpensive. They were enormously expensive.

And then you add in the programing cost, to make the best programing that we’ve ever seen in some ways in the history of television. High cinematic production values, this cost a fortune. And this is all weighing on everybody’s balance sheets right now as we’re going into 2024.

You know, back in the day, it always irritated me that you had to get both HBO and Showtime. And I’m feeling the same way. If I want to get all the stuff that I want to get, I really have to do all those channels and they all have something on them.

You have to work three jobs to pay for it all too.

There’s a couple other things. Well, the major thing to watch, I think, for next year and maybe the most important thing since the advent of the internet — and I’m not even being hyperbolic here — is generative AI and its potential not only to change every part of our life, every industry, it’s going to affect broadcasters and it’s going to affect them imminently.

When I was at the IBC show in Amsterdam back in September, the word every single booth there was repeating like a mantra was the word
“efficiency,” because everyone realized they needed to get more efficiency out of their technologies than they have been getting. They need to lighten the load on people who are working in news, who are overworked. They need to get rid of redundant activities that go on routinely in newsrooms.

And AI, generative AI, has the opportunity to wend into so many facets of news production and lighten the workload, do incredible good potentially toward reducing the kind of redundancies that are out there helping, for instance, with versioning content from multiple platforms, which is a very onerous part of people’s jobs at TV stations as one example. It has so many appeals, and it’s becoming so much more precise, so sharp and so intelligent, it’s machine learning, so it’s always learning from what it’s doing. And its appeal to news producing companies is enormous on many levels. They are also extremely wary of the knock-on effects that it brings with it.

I’m sorry, what kind of effects?

The knock-on effects of, you know, just various things that will happen that as a result of adoption that you have to consider. You know, one of the things, for instance, being the major trust issues that consumers have with all sorts of televison, both local and national television, at this point.

When you’re employing AI at any level of the news process — and it can be applied at every level from news gathering to writing material, editing — all of this stuff can be automated. It can intermediate itself in very minute and very substantive ways that you might consider to be authorial in some ways.

The industry now has to reckon with how do you tell viewers about how you’re using it? If you are, what sort of disclosures do you offer there? And if you do disclose — I just read something today that the viewers want to know when it’s being employed, but they trust you less when you tell them. So, you know, you’ve got a real conundrum, there.

Yeah, really. Are you hip to what happened to Sports Illustrated?

Sports Illustrated, Gannett. I mean, those who have used it compositionally to write stories and yet, mind you, AP has been using it for years in that regard. They have these sort of templatized stories that they use to report earnings for a lot of small companies that allowed them to produce a lot more earnings coverage than they had been doing because they create a written template, and they plug in data points that are sort of scraped with the AI.

They did the same thing for minor league sports and baseball. And we’re talking like five or so years ago. It’s been out there, and they were fully transparent about its use there. Other groups are murkier in the way that they have used it.

Well, SI, which I consider a great journalistic brand. I don’t know what it is lately, I don’t read it. They were making up reporters. I mean, they were using stock photos and putting little blurbs at the end of the story. I mean…

And I still don’t think, as of this moment they have not come completely clean with what happened there. But it does enormous damage to the credibility of the brand. Of course, SI had some damage done, you know, going into this. And I think it’s often groups that are in dire straits, like Gannett, who are using it very liberally. But some TV station groups, look, many of the SVPs of news that I talked to in local station groups have a high, very elevated level of concern about it. They know they have to deal with it. They know it’s kind of fashioning into an arms race where someone is going to start using it and they’re going to get a competitive edge by doing so. So, they can’t just stick their head in the sand about it.

The stage that they are mostly at right now as groups is to form a sort of steering committee or some sort of internal apparatus that can start to assimilate all the information, the developments that are going on around this world — and they are coming daily, fast and thick — to try to get a handle on simply what is the narrative around this technology, how can it be used and what are the pitfalls we need to be aware of?

And there are also industry-wide consortia that are beginning to consolidate around this, around subsets of the AI issue, for instance, content authenticity, and we’ve had some podcasts and other material just this year about this subject.

How do you authenticate stuff because it’s so easy… AI can be weaponized as sort of tool of manipulation of content, and what do you do? How do you discern that? How do you prevent your own content from being in some way altered and misused once it’s out in the wild? And so, there are technologies being developed to watermark things once they’re disseminated, and there’s a sort of manifest that follows it. It’s extremely complicated, and it’s an arms race between the sort of bad actors using AI and the news organizations who want to use it to good effect.

Well, look, let me interrupt you. What would you advise the broadcasters? You say there’s sort of a downside to transparency, Right?

There is.

You can’t be too honest.

Well, so it seems. I mean, there was one report that found that viewers then have a wary eye that they raise around that. But there’s already a handful of news organizations who are wholly creating content with AI, that you can just get rid of reporters altogether.

This is one of the facets that’s going to have to be dealt with, and it does present, it should be really clear, that if companies broadly adopt generative AI into their newsrooms, it doesn’t seem possible that positions won’t be eliminated in the process. And those are positions that require a lot of critical intelligence.

And so, you know, I don’t want to say that producers all need to be worried about their job security per se. But the notion of a gen AI filling the many facets of the producer role is imminent and many other roles. You can have an AI-generated synthetic anchor or an avatar of one of your existing real human anchors, right now.

Well, TVNewsCheck has been sort of on the cutting edge of reporting that they can’t find producers. So, it sounds to me nobody’s going to lose their jobs, they’re just…

Probably not.

This may save stations.

Harry, I have a disclosure for you: You’ve been talking to an AI this whole time. I’m not actually, not actually me. It’s just my avatar. Just kidding. But it’s close. We’re close to that, and so the point is, broadcasters need to lean into this. They need to pay close attention, read everything they can. They should have a point person or group if they don’t have that now already. And these groups, these people are going to have to make some very consequential choices over the next months and year with regards to this technology.

Well, that’s great editorial fodder.

We’re all over it.

You should be.

I just want to bring up one last thing I think that we’re all going to obviously be looking at for next year and deeply concerned about, which is coverage of the 2024 election, because you have a very, very difficult needle to thread, even just looking through the lens of local television stations here where everything is politicized at every single level. You can’t just say, well, we’re local, we’re not national, we don’t have to worry about the same trust issues. They do. Mistrust has widened and it’s deeply impacted local news, and they cannot put their heads in the sand with regards to engaging the deeply polemicized viewerships that they have right now.

Trump is almost certain to be the Republican nominee and Biden the Democratic nominee. And with more and more utterances coming from Trump that are deeply, concerningly anti-democratic in nature, as in threatening the core tenants of the republic, stations have to wrestle with how they present that, that language, its consequences. What we know, in this particular candidacy, is issues that are raised that are very, very serious to the future of U.S. democracy as we have long known it.

They risk in engaging that to any degree utter alienation of Republican voters, for instance, and to abdicate in any way they risk alienating Democratic voters or just generally left-leaning voters who feel that that abdication is a failure of responsibility. And so, on that front, again, they’re going to have to make daily decisions about coverage. And they’ve struggled with this, and they continue to struggle with it about how to contextualize all of this. And how to get out of the horse race to talk about the larger issues that affect the state of the republic right now.

So, those are those are some serious, serious things that they’re going to have to grapple with, as well as the safety of their reporters. I mean, reporters are assaulted in small ways and large ways, much more than people realize in this country. It is a dangerous job. They’re in the crosshairs. People have been whipped up into a kind of frenzy and they feel very, very free about attacking verbally or otherwise or making threats on social media or in person reporters at every level.

And so, every single newsroom is going to have to develop protocols and keep iterating those protocols and have security with their reporters when they’re in situations that could become dangerous and so many more situations can become dangerous now.

OK, here’s a question for you, you want to pontificate, sir. Do broadcasters have a responsibility or are they liable? Because of the nature, I mean they’re going to take all this political advertising in next year, right? A lot of it is provocative, a lot of it is pretty nasty. It can get pretty nasty. Doesn’t that sort of fuel this conflict out there in the real world?

So, you’re sort of warning broadcasters that they’re going to have a tough time covering this election next year. At the same time, they’re sort of whipping up the electorate with just broadcasting those ads. I didn’t use the word responsible because they’re not, because of the way the law is written. They are not liable for a lot of what goes into those ads. Their obligation is they air them pretty much as they receive them. What do you think?

Well, like you said, their responsibilities are somewhat limited. They’re certainly not going to turn down that money. They need it badly. But, you know, it kind of also circles around to a broader media literacy problem that we have in this country where, you know, a lot of viewers conflate everything they see into one big kind of organism.

They don’t make these delineations. We’ve done a terrible job as a country, given how saturated we are with media. We have an electorate which is ill informed in many, many, many cases and conflates a lot of material. Of course, those problems are conflated by some news organizations themselves, particularly on cable, particularly in primetime, where this conflation of opinion and news is just wholly realized at this point.

So, we have that problem to untangle and no immediate solution presenting itself. If I could dictate something to the industry, I would advise trying to weave in media literacy efforts more often into their programing in small and large ways, if they could, to help viewers understand and unpack critically the things with which they are being presented.

And you can do that in all sorts of ways. But right now, this problem does face us immediately. And these are the dynamics that are already well in motion. And so, we’ve got to play the hand that we’ve been dealt.

I think that’s a good answer. Media literacy and broadcasters, I think, should do that. Again, this gets back to transparency. What they’re doing, what’s really happening out there, when the politicians say this, what do they really mean and not?

I don’t think they should stand in judgment just to know that, at the very least, know what the incentives that are driving media understand the economics of the business so viewers can sort of understand why they do some of the things that they do. I think that having a good industry-wide campaign for the industry, for broadcasters to undertake…

At the same moment, it should be clear that a lot of groups have made great leaps forward in just the last couple of years in the way that they’re covering stories, in realizing that they need to build transparency more into the process, what they’re showing viewers and showing them behind the curtain of news production a little bit more than they ever have, trying various creative ways to be more transparent.

And the product is everywhere that you can see of that nature, and there has been great improvement. They are meeting, trying to meet the moment in that sense. So, I’m optimistic that an effect of all of this has been that that most of the major groups have been introspective about their news product, iterating it much more dramatically than they have for decades.

Well, they are still considered the most trusted source of news, so they’ve got to be careful not to lose that.

Yes, exactly. And they know it. Well, I think a good note to leave it on is the prospect of trust and hope springs eternal. Harry, it’s been great talking with you once again and looking back and ahead to 2024. We’ll see you next year.

OK, yes, sir. See you then.

Thank you. And you can watch past episodes of Talking TV, at TVNewsCheck.com, as well as on our YouTube channel. We will be back in the new year with a whole slate of new Talking TV podcasts every Friday and look forward to seeing you then. Have a good new year.

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Catalyzing a year of AI fanfare was ChatGPT. The chatbot gave the world a glimpse of recent advances in computer science even if not everyone figured out quite how it works or what to do with it.

“I would call this an inflection moment,” pioneering AI scientist Fei-Fei Li said. “2023 is, in history, hopefully going to be remembered for the profound changes of the technology as well as the public awakening. It also shows how messy this technology is.”

The post 2023: The Year We Played With AI — And Weren’t Sure What To Do About It appeared first on TV News Check.

Based on ATSC 3.0, an advanced television broadcasting technology, NextGen TV can be enhanced with internet content to enable viewers to get more out of live sports, live news, and live events in real-time. ATSC 3.0 gives broadcasters the power to serve their markets with a range of high value data services in addition to improved television broadcasting, the release said.

“In addition, NextGen TV adds a new dimension to TV viewing, with vibrant video and new Voice+ dialogue enhancement that brings voices to the foreground,” the release continued. “Movie theater-quality sound lets viewers hear every voice clearly and keeps the volume consistent across channels.  NextGen TV also  improves the way broadcasters reach viewers with emergency alerts and can support a wide range of features currently in development.”

NextGen TV is touted as “the most significant broadcast technology upgrade in history.” Features available will vary by device and station as broadcasters roll out service across the country. NextGen TV can continue to evolve as new technologies are introduced because it is built on the same basic technologies that power the internet and mobile broadband. New sets compatible with ATSC 3.0 are marked with the distinctive “NEXTGEN TV” logo.

The launch of NextGen TV follows a decade of development and months of planning and preparation by the local stations, the release said. Owned by Mission Broadcasting, WPIX has converted to ATSC 3.0 transmissions and will broadcast its own programming, as well as the programming of the other participating stations, in the NextGen TV format. All programming of the participating stations will continue to be available in the existing DTV format, which can be received on all modern television sets. BitPath, which is developing new data broadcasting services, led the planning process and coordinated transition efforts across the three television stations.

From Honolulu to Houston and from Miami to Seattle, NextGen TV service is already available in dozens of markets across the country. New York metro area viewers can learn more about NextGen TV by visiting www.WatchNextGenTV.com, which offers a guide listing cities where NextGen TV is already live, as well as links to available NextGen TV set models.

Antenna viewers without NextGen TV sets can simply rescan their TV sets to ensure uninterrupted service. Rescan instructions are available at fcc.gov/rescan. Cable and satellite subscribers do not need to take any action.

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