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.

The post Metadata Is Key To Archive Monetization appeared first on TV News Check.

Speakers are Devon Armijo, director of digital news integration, Hearst Television; Mike Palmer, AVP advanced technology/media management, Sinclair; Philippe Petitpont, CEO, Newsbridge; Ben Ramos, VP, Fox archive, field and emerging tech, Fox News. TVNewsCheck Contributing Editor Glen Dickson will moderate the discussion.

“AI has fundamentally changed the process of metatagging archives and making them more thoroughly searchable, which in turn has offered pathways to new content creation and licensing opportunities drawing from those archives,” said Michael Depp, chief content officer, NewsCheckMedia and editor, TVNewsCheck. “This session will look closely at how a well-organized, easy-to-retrieve-from archive can have numerous benefits for newsrooms under pressure.

“The panel will also look at the emerging challenge of how media companies can authenticate their deep trove of archival content and determine rights ownership,” he added.

NewsTECHForum, now in its 10^th year, is co-located with the Sports Video Group Summit. The conference’s theme for 2023 is Adapting to a Culture of Continuous Crisis.

Featured sessions are:

• Keynote: Democracy, Technology, TV Journalism and the 2024 Election
• Reassessing the Streaming News Content Strategy
• Chasing AI: Threatening or Enhancing the News?
• Adapting to a Culture of Continuous Crisis
• Agility in News Production
• Building the Architecture of More Collaborative Content Creation

Register here.

The post NewsTECHForum: Harvesting Archives For New Content And Opportunities appeared first on TV News Check.

While preserving all that old video sounds like an overwhelming project, only by doing so can broadcasters learn what assets they have access to, industry experts said during the Mining the Archives for New Shows panel at TVNewsCheck’s Programming Everywhere event on April 16 at the NAB Show.

Fox did a proof-of-concept preservation project of 5,000 tapes to convert the magnetic tapes and apply metadata to old video, Ben Ramos, VP, Fox Archive, field and emerging technology at Fox News, said.

Some of the content was damaged, and about 5% of the original conversions failed, but what made it through the process “was just pure gold, amazing content that hasn’t seen the light of day in 40 years,” he said.

The organization saw a return on the investment within nine months, he added, and expanded the project by an additional 45,000 tapes.

“It’s not until you make an effort, touch it, make an effort, that’s when you find how many assets you really have,” Ramos said.

A 60-minute tape costs Fox about $100 for the “Cadillac version” of conversion and tagging, Ramos said, while the “Kia version” with no bells and whistles runs around $20. But the higher-end version can yield “so many products” such as three seconds of New York City taxi cabs from 1977 and frame grabs of famous people, he said.

But Fox is also “reaching out to old news directors and photographers and assignment editors and people who were there that day” and asking them to provide detailed metadata on the old videos, Ramos said.

“It’s onerous and expensive,” he said, but added that the company “thinks it’s necessary with this specific subset of product,” although the return on investment for this undertaking remains to be seen. He called it a “curated white glove service that AI can’t replicate” that makes the quality of Fox’s archive “that much more special.”

Overall, he said, he needs “around $100 million” to digitize all the archives, but the steps to date have led to significant funding for more preservation efforts.

Nora Zimmett, The Weather Channel president, news and original series, said her organization has thousands of tapes in climate-controlled storage and is in the process of digitizing them.

“I didn’t appreciate how much of a process that is,” she said. “It’s not just the process, but the metadata, where to put it, and where to store it and how much to download.”

The metadata is critical, she said. “Your archive isn’t worth anything if you can’t find video by keywords,” Zimmett said. “It’s one thing to digitize and put it in the cloud, it’s another if there’s a user experience so producers and users can find the materials.”

The Weather Channel is bringing archived content into its current projects.

“You can slice and dice it so many different ways,” she said. “One piece of content can have so many lives now that we are well beyond a linear environment.”

And there’s no time like the present to focus on making the archives easier to use. “Every hour that goes by, we’re creating more video,” although that is being better tagged in the moment, she said. “It’s like the roadrunner — you’re never caught up.”

Zimmett said she wonders whether licensing an organization’s content to a big studio devalues the content. “After you answer the question of ‘can we,’ sometimes we wrestle with ‘should we?’” she said.

Jon Accarrino, VP of transformation and strategic initiatives for Capitol Broadcasting Co., said much of his company’s early content was destroyed due to improper storage, but in 2014 CBC digitized all of its tapes. It took truckloads, he said, to move the 36,000 tapes that needed to be converted.

“We sent off all these trucks, had all that content digitized and they mailed back this tiny little hard drive” full of SD video, he said.

In 2007, the company moved into fully digital operations with Bitcentral’s Oasis, and as such is working through archiving that content as well.

“A lot of it is older, MPE2 formats we need to recompress and move to new archive system we’re building,” he said.

And while a lot of companies are opting to store their archives in the cloud as a primary location, despite the egress costs, CBC relies on two physical locations with cloud as the backup. CBC is soft-launching its archives soon, he said.

Sam Peterson, Bitcentral COO, said many of the industry’s archives are not very organized. “The state of metadata and how interconnected it is, and the process they used to get it there, runs the gamut,” he said. “Some are thinking for the long-term, but some do not have the foresight.”

It is important to work with the end in mind. “What do we want to end up with, and how do we get there are thing you have to work through pretty quickly to not make it worse,” he said.

Peterson cautioned that archives maintenance can be simple but is not complete once a project is over.

“Know it will be iterative approach” because tools are rapidly evolving, he said. “The main thing is not to lose any more content. Let’s get it captured, at least.”

Read more from Programming Everywhere here.

The post News Organizations Find ‘Pure Gold’ In Their Archives appeared first on TV News Check.

Ben Ramos, VP, Fox Archive, field and emerging technology, Fox News; Nora Zimmett, president, news and original series, The Weather Channel; Jon Accarrino, VP of transformation and strategic initiatives, Capitol Broadcasting; and Sam Peterson, CTO, Bitcentral, will join moderator Michael Depp, chief content officer, NewsTECHMedia and editor of TVNewsCheck for the 3:15 p.m. panel.

“News organizations have realized what amazing material they’ve been sitting on for years, and the more progressive among them have been digitizing and metatagging that content for numerous applications,” Depp said. “This discussion will look at the processes they’ve employed to get a handle on their archives, the technology that has enabled them to do it and the original new shows and revenue opportunities they’ve developed from their efforts.”

Programming Everywhere gathers industry leaders to talk about the evolving business of content creation and distribution, with a focus on new development, reinventing local and national news and extending media brands on streaming.

TV station group senior executives will join programming, news and marketing leaders, syndicated programming executives and streaming media and technology leaders to take on issues such as the changing economics of syndicated programming, the relationship between FAST channels and the evolution of broadcasting, transforming television news and strategies for creating a programming everywhere business.

Participants will also consider their No. 1 challenge: creating more content for a multimedia audience, and how technologies like artificial intelligence, the cloud and IP production platforms can free up creative talent while streamlining costs.

Panels include FAST Channels and the Evolution of Broadcasting; Syndication’s Changing Business Model; Rethinking Genres: Games, Travel, Talk and More; Fresh Approaches to the News Franchise; Strategies for Building A Content Everywhere Business; and In Conversation: Anthony Zuiker on Creating New Shows That Break the Mold.

Register here for Programming Everywhere.

The post Finding Content Gold In Your Archives At Programming Everywhere appeared first on TV News Check.

Trucks with internet protocol (IP) capabilities, the intelligent use of 2 GHz and LTE bandwidth, the potential of low earth orbit satellites and some benefits of 5G networks are all parts of the puzzle. At the same time, broadcasters need to balance information security (infosec) with speed, panelists said during the Reinventing the Live Shot session of TVNewsCheck’s NewsTECHForum conference on Tuesday.

During COVID, Rich Paleski, WCBS New York’s director of operations, said mobile news vehicles were valuable as isolated, powered, climate controlled operating areas for photographers and journalists to use as a mobile editing booth when it was not possible to get them into the studios.

“News vehicles, especially the trucks, became how we produced a lot of the news,” Paleski said.

Ben Ramos, VP for Fox archive, field and emerging technology at Fox News, said Fox added partitions to the vehicles as well as enabling technologies that were a benefit to field work, such as the ability to see the return and the prompter.

Ernie Ensign, senior director for news technology at Sinclair Broadcast Group, said trucks can serve as a production tool and that it’s unlikely the trucks will completely go away. He said Sinclair is considering ways to re-invent them into future-proofed tools.

“Over the last few years, we made the transition to more IP-centric trucks,” Ensign said. An added benefit of the trucks, he said, is that they offer “a great place to camp people out in” at events like inaugurations and other large events.

But during those events, transmission can be iffy due to increased demand on networks. In situations with “saturated bandwidth,” Ensign said, it’s important to have different transmission technologies available. Such options include bonded cellular, satellite, mesh networks, LTE and personal hotspots.

Another option is 2 GHZ, which Ensign said is “reliable, and you get distance out of it.”

Paleski noted that WCBS relies on 2 GHz because “it’s ours” but that “the 2 GHz in your truck is half of the solution. You still need someone back at the studio to receive that signal.”

Sometimes LTE uploads are slower, though, and it could be baster to “just drive content back to the station,” at least early in the pandemic when traffic was light, he said.

And while bonded cellular is a great tool, Paleski said, WCBS is not ignoring other tools. WCBS maintains 2 GHz and radios to ensure they will have cuing so they can do live shots.

Ensign said broadcasters need to leverage 2 GHz. “What happens to a resource that’s not getting used? The FCC takes it or Verizon wants it. It’s something we need to protect.”

Tim Stevens, global leader for strategic innovation for sports, media and entertainment at Verizon Business Group, said the challenge is in figuring out spectrum management because it may be reallocated or repurposed as workflows grow increasingly complex. “We’ll figure out how to re-use the 2 GHz spectrum,” he said.

Another potential transmission tool is the low earth orbit satellite.

Ensign said the Starlink beta tests look very promising with low latency and download speeds of 50 mbps and uploads of 30 to 40 mbps. He said he wants to see “real world and consistent real world” speeds without latency fluctuations day to day.

“There are some promising features there, it’s just not available widely yet,” he said.

The 5G network, still rolling out, is another technology that may help broadcasters with live shots.

“We’re in an upload business and 5G is built as a download spectrum,” Stevens said. “You’re competing for a smaller opportunity than the network was built for.”

Ensign said some of the testing Sinclair has done with 5G is “not that much different” than 4G results.

Stevens said Verizon’s own tests have shown interesting results. One is that a use case for 5G is pushing graphic material out to the edge for computing while newsgathering activities are ongoing, he said. It could change certain workflows, he said.

“There’s a lot happening. It’s early in terms of maturity and development,” Stevens said.

He said he expects a proliferation of new toolsets, and that 5G-enabled technology will be native on equipment like cameras. “We will see the real penetration and usage of those tools in daily production environment,” he said.

Whatever technologies the broadcasters use, however, must be secure.

Finding the balance between remaining operational in the field and stringent policies imposed by IT is challenging, Ensign said.

“We want them to be able to transmit content, and IT wants to keep us protected,” he said.

Ramos said Fox has been testing a lot of technologies, and during one recent test, he said, the info-sec team said it needed to be shut down because of 29 vulnerabilities with it.

“The info-sec team is your friend, and you’ve got to get them involved early and often,” Ramos said.

For more stories on NewsTECHForum 2021, click here.

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Leaders in traditional and non-traditional ENG will imagine the future together in the discussion featuring Ben Ramos, VP field operations and emerging technology, Fox News; Ernie Ensign, senior director, news technology, Sinclair Broadcast Group; and Rich Paleski, director of operations at WCBS. Mike Fass, technology and workflow consultant at EVERForward Strategies, will moderate the 2 p.m. ET panel, which will be presented in person at the New York Hilton as well as virtually.

In-person attendees at the New York Hilton will be required to show proof of complete vaccination and extensive COVID safety protocols will be in place on site for the event, which will be co-located with Sports Video Group’s annual summit.

Panels will explore a wide range of the industry’s most pressing challenges and exciting technological opportunities. They will include a keynote interview with Fox Weather President Sharri Berg and meteorologists Amy Freeze and Craig Herrera, and panels including News Operations in a Changed World; The Cloud and the Future of News Production; Remote Production and the Future of News Storytelling; Reinventing TV News for a Connected World; and News Technology and Combatting Disinformation.

Attendees will have access to a Technology Showcase featuring socially distanced exhibits hosted by companies including Grass Valley, Ross Video, TVU and others. Attendees will also have access to sessions at the Sports Video Group Summit, which is co-located with NewsTECHForum.

Register here for NewsTECHForum 2021.

The post Reinventing The Live Shot At NewsTECHForum appeared first on TV News Check.

Those home studio setups have evolved in the last six weeks as broadcasters fine-tuned remote production workflows, created new ways to use existing technology and tools and upgraded equipment.

As could be expected, bonded cellular is playing its part in transmitting content, and broadcasters are relying on file compression services to move big video files. Broadcasters are also increasingly embracing the cloud and cloud-based applications. Some believe once the current pandemic crisis is over, many of the new workflows will remain in place and that more work will be done remotely.

Kellie DiVeglia with Gray Television’s WIS Columbia, S.C., directs a live newscast from home. In this setup, all elements of Gray’s Technical Media Producer, a fully-automated workflow, are accessible remotely, including all production and master control functions. (Source: Gray)

For the last decade, Gray Television has been rolling out its fully-automated Technical Media Producer production and operations workflow. Mike Fass, VP for broadcast operations at Gray Television, calls TMP an enabler for stations to quickly set-up secondary on-air control points, both within the stations and remotely.

The TMP workflow put Gray’s stations into a position where they can access and operate the core systems remotely.

“We’ve seen the benefits of this workflow,” Fass says. “Accessing these systems remotely isn’t anything new, we’re just doing it in a greater capacity at this point.”

For NBCU employees, editing or producing from home was tough until the organization started using remote desktop, which allows employees to access the resources of the facility remotely, says Keith Barbaria, VP technology for NBC Boston properties.

With remote desktop, employees only need a basic computer and a solid internet connection, he adds. “That’s given us the biggest flexibility.”

NBCU, Tegna Build On Experience

Nate Isenor, NBCU’s director of field operations for stations in Boston, says NBCU largely expanded on the practices of field crews and correspondents. “They’re used to the remote environment,” he says.

Even so, it was a scramble to get new workflows into place, according to Barbaria. “When you take the workflows you do in the facility and you move them out of the facility, it has a snowball effect,” he says. “It affects everybody.”

At the same time, Barbaria says the group has “had to reimagine” how to use technology in different ways, which has led to a number of one-off solutions. One, he says, is using conference call technology not just for conducting interviews but to provide video back to the field.

Tegna’s KHOU Houston flooded during Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and was produced remotely for a year before the new facilities were operational. Working through that gave Tegna a lot of experience with remote operations, says Robert Lydick, Tegna’s VP of station operations.

“We were able to give that playbook to our other stations,” Lydick says. The basics of that playbook are having good communications, low latency and certain critical pieces of technology, he says.

Tegna had to plan and equip staff for remote operations at all of its stations.

KUSA Denver anchor Kim Christiansen’s at-home setup. (Source: KUSA/9News)

“We sent out 300 laptops to people across the company,” Lydick says. “There were computer delays, camera delays. The sources of equipment have been constrained.”

Even so, since the crisis began, there’s been a shift from equipment employees “needed to have” to equipment that would be “nice to have” like a better monitor, which shows “just how far we’ve come,” he says.

A ‘Whirlwind’ For Fox News

Fox News, which launched its first home studio about a decade ago with Mark Fuhrman in Idaho, had built out about 30 home studios between then and the start of coronavirus stay home orders.

“Since then, a whirlwind has gone on,” says Ben Ramos, VP of field operations and emerging technology at Fox News.

Fox now has about 60 home studios, he says. “We kind of threw the kitchen sink at this one. Everybody needed to be at home.”

And the variety of equipment in use reflects that. Some have broadcast-quality cameras and some are using iPhones with tripods, lights and mics from a chain store.

“We’re using everything,” Ramos says.

But, he notes, Fox had the opportunity to experiment with robotics with its earlier home sets, which helped the organization with setting up some of the recent home studios.

“The best part about the remote robotic studio is there’s nobody in the room. We’re controlling it from our headquarters or third-party NOC,” Ramos says.

Bonded Cellular’s Moment

But the home environment presents specific challenges when it comes to sending broadcast content back to the station, such as internet connectivity. Often, home internet connections aren’t robust enough to handle the demands of broadcast-related activities. As a result, many broadcasters have turned to bonded cellular.

As Ramos puts it, bonded cellular is carrying the day for many of Fox’s anchors.

While bonded cellular technology has helped transmit live video feed back to the station’s studio, it can also be used to send video, audio and information to the person in the home studio, says Claudia Barbiero, VP of marketing and strategic live productions at LiveU. This equipment can be controlled remotely, she adds.

LiveU has a bonding app for smartphones that’s “super easy” to use. While the app has previously been used for breaking news by someone in the community without a professional camera, she says, the app makes it possible to click a link from the studio to gain access to certain production settings so the phone’s camera takes good quality video. Usage on that app is up about 150%, she says.

As Yvonne Monterroso, director for product management at Dejero, puts it, normal internet connections can “flicker.” But broadcasters want “reliability that their internet is not going to do a little hiccup,” she says.

Dejero stated making available a prototype connectivity kit earlier this year. The kit includes the GateWay network appliance and equipment such as CuePoint return video server, WayPoint receiver and PathWay encoder.

“It’s almost a station in a kit,” Monterroso says.

File Transfers

Part of making the most of connectivity is compressing file sizes. Latakoo compresses files, but also makes it possible to modify the file while it’s being transferred.

“We’ve had enormous uptick in traffic,” says Jade Kurian, Latakoo president and co-founder. “There has been an extraordinary amount of news coverage and demand, and our customer base is changing the way they work. They can’t drive the story into the station to edit it, they can’t collaborate within the newsroom.”

NBC10 Boston/NECN Reporter Abbey Niezgoda working from home using the Dejero app, Sennheiser lav mic, Ring light, Dracast light, Latakoo for logging video and Zoom IQ-7 for voice over recording. (Source: NBC10 Boston)

Instead, she says, entire shows are being produced completely remotely, using Latakoo to send the file from the field to the cloud. The upshot, she says, is multiple people can collaborate on the file.

Jeff Moore, EVP at Ross Video, says remote production technology is being applied more generally by clients, some of whom hadn’t done much remote production in the past. Whether the expectation is for the remote work to be temporary or long-term will determine how the remote solution looks, he says.

If it’s temporary, such as in the midst of the pandemic to keep workers safe, “we generally counsel them to make as few changes as possible to the systems themselves” by implementing technology that will carry the client through the short term. Such technology might include Remote Desktop to remotely control computer-based equipment like XPression Graphics or OverDrive Automation.

But if the client expects remote production to be a long-term or permanent situation, the “solution will be probably much different,” Moore says. In that case, he notes, it’s likely that station would need to contract with the internet service provider in the area for a dedicated connection to ensure reliable bandwidth.

The Cloud’s Appeal Grows

TVU Networks CEO Paul Shen says broadcasters are increasingly turning to cloud and IP-based technologies to find the tools they need to meet remote production challenges. One of the reasons is cloud-based operations merely require a login, whereas many studios rely on equipment and hardware.

“Most of the television stations don’t even have the ability to move the equipment in or out,” Shen says.

For example, if a station relies on a playout system, it’s still possible to control playout via the cloud. TVU Producer, Shen says, has a playout functionality.

“We never intended to develop a full-blown playout system,” Shen says. But with some rapid integration and development efforts, he says, TVU made it possible for some of its customers to use TVU Producer to do complete half-hour newscasts in the cloud.

Ray Thompson, Avid’s director of marketing solutions for broadcast and media, says COVID-19 will usher in the true cloud era for video production.

The last six weeks or so have altered the way broadcasters are thinking about migrating to the cloud.

“Before, we had a lot of cloud activity and customers migrating, but it was a deliberate, multi-year approach for most of the Avid customers,” Thompson says. “But once COVID hit, it was, ‘Get me to the cloud and get me to the cloud yesterday.”

And one of Avid’s newer offerings — Edit On Demand — is a turnkey editing solution in the cloud. Avid had rolled out Edit On Demand in a “controlled fashion” during IBC last year and had about 20 early adopters at different phases of deployment with the tool.

“After COVID-19, that went up from 20 or so to hundreds,” Thompson says. Avid took advantage of the partnership with Microsoft to scale and ramp up Edit On Demand fast, he says.

Neil Cavuto anchors Your World with Neil Cavuto on Fox News Channel as well as Cavuto Coast to Coast on Fox Business Network. His remote-controlled home studio setup includes a broadcast-quality Sony PTZ camera, DMX lighting, prompter glass in front of the lens, confidence return just below the lens and a 70-inch monitor background. Everything is controlled from Rob Melick Productions/Always-On Network Operations Center in Allentown, Pa. According to Fox News, the organization has always had technicians on site for anchor home studios, but these systems have prompted a “re-think” about that SOP. (Source: Fox News)

Chris Merrill, Grass Valley’s director of product marketing, says some customers were ready to work from home because their workflows were already cloud-based.

When “everybody had to work from home, they said, ‘We don’t care.’ They just kept going. They were ready to do that,” Merrill says.

Mostly, he says, they were doing remote production from a sports venue, but the same model is applicable to a person’s house.

About a week ago, Grass Valley launched its cloud-based Agile Media Processing Platform, which allows production teams to customize workflows and includes apps such as multiviewers, router panels, test signal generators, switchers, graphics renderers, clip players and recorders.

Kevin Joyce, TAG Video Systems’ Zero Friction officer, believes the workflows developed during the coronavirus pandemic will persist after stay-at-home orders expire and social distancing wanes.

Traditional broadcast engineers had “a lot of reasons” live production in the cloud “was never going to work,” he says. Chief among them, he adds, was latency.

He believes some of the requirements they held vendors to will be less important than getting content to consumers.

“I think a lot of the barriers that were there are going to be crossed,” Joyce says. “I’m seeing a lot more acceptance of digital, and people trying things.”

In fact, Joyce sees a future that doesn’t stop with remote production. “I think remote production will get bypassed. I think we’ll move to an era of virtual production.”

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