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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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.

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The discussion will examine station groups’ progress in moving live news to the cloud along with the differences in cloud adoption between networks and local stations. It will also consider how to leverage the cloud for both network and local station operations.

“Given the current state of technology, the key question is what makes sense to keep on prem and what broadcast functions make sense to move to public or private cloud,” said TVNewsCheck Editor Michael Depp. “This panel will confront those questions directly drawing from their immediate experience.”

Register here.

Speakers:

Tim Joyce, SVP of Engineering, Operations and Technology, Fox Television Stations — Prior to joining FTS, Joyce spent nearly three years as the SVP of media and broadcast engineering for Fox Corp. Previously, he was the SVP of technology business relations for Fox Networks Group in Los Angeles, and before that, as VP of broadcast operations for Fox Networks Group in Europe and Africa.

Joyce spent six years as VP of operations and production services for National Geographic Channels International. He began his career as a senior editor for Fox Latin American Channels. A graduate of the University of Southern California, Joyce holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in international relations and Spanish.

Mike Palmer, Senior Director, Media Management, Sinclair Broadcast Group — Prior to his current role at Sinclair, Palmer was CTO of Masstech, where he was responsible for defining and overseeing the company’s technical strategies for developing new technologies that allow it to grow its position in existing and new markets.

Palmer is an active contributor to SMPTE standards and is also spokesperson emeritus of the MOS Protocol Group, an organization which he led for nearly 15 years which was awarded a 2017 Technology and Engineering Emmy. Palmer is also a recipient of Broadcasting + Cable’s Technology Leadership Award. Both awards recognize the impact of technical standards and highly integrated systems on the work done every day by thousands of journalists around the world.

Prior to Masstech, Palmer worked for the Associated Press, where he was director of ENPS design and integration strategy.  Earlier, Palmer held both editorial and technical management positions at the local, group and national levels in the U.S.

Sam Peterson, Chief Operating Officer, Bitcentral — As chief operating officer, Peterson has direct control of the organization’s operations in accordance with Bitcentral’s strategic objectives and business plans. Peterson is a career broadcast professional with more than 32 years of experience including over 20 years in various leadership roles at large, industry-leading corporations.

He has held positions spanning product management, marketing, direct sales and sales engineering. His broad experience spans all aspects of media production and distribution including automation, master control and playout, news gathering and production, post-production, signal management and live production. He has successfully overseen the integration of several products from international acquisitions into the North American market.

On the OTT side, Peterson has extensive networking expertise in contribution and distribution networks for live streaming and video on demand. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Communications from Austin College.

Matt Varney, VP of Technology & Operations, NBCUniversal Local — He is focused on helping harness technology, develop leaders and equip teams in their mission to engage viewers with the people, places and events that matter most. Varney believes in challenging the status quo and getting people excited about where new technical possibilities intersect with business opportunities and challenges. And of course, building cool new things.

Over 16 years with NBCU, Varney has worked with some of the best teams in the industry designing and implementing state of the art technologies for modern news and production workflows. His projects include the design and buildout of The Studios at DFW, a 75,000 square-foot news facility that is home to KXAS (NBC), KXTX (Telemundo) and LX, the division’s TV and OTT network for millennials and Gen Z-ers. Varney also oversaw the implementation of the division’s ST-2110 based, virtualized “Production Cloud” infrastructure in DFW, which remotely hosts live local news production for multiple stations across the county.

Varney knows that while progress is made at the bleeding edge, it’s the teams you cultivate that can turn the bleeding into leading.

He is a reformed music school graduate living in a video world and holds a BA in production and engineering from Berklee College of Music.

Andy Warman, SVP Product, Imagine Communications — He oversees playout, infrastructure and networking solutions. These solutions encompass video processing, routing, video server, storage, automation and media workflows for broadcast and OTT applications and leverage cloud computing, on premises systems and the internet to enable linear services that will scale as customer needs evolve.

Before joining Imagine Communications, Warman was director of product management for live linear services — Comcast Technology Solutions’ self-service channel delivery, live linear processing, virtual hannel and linear rights metadata management solutions for content providers, MVPDs and vMVPDs.

Warman spent seven years at Harmonic as director of playout solutions for its VOS360 cloud-based channel origination and distribution solution and product manager for the Spectrum media server and shared storage solutions. He also served on the board of directors of the Alliance for IP Media Solutions (AIMS) and chaired the trade association’s marketing working group, which promotes the adoption of media over IP solutions to replace legacy SDI uncompressed video workflows.

He also spent 11 years at Harris Broadcast (now Imagine Communications) where he drove Harris’ channel-in-a-box strategy, video server platform, storage, editing and graphics product lines. He has a wealth of domain experience in the production and playout arena, as well as automation, news production, content creation and infrastructure common to broadcast workflows.

Glen Dickson, Contributing Editor, TVNewsCheck (Moderator)

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That’s meant station group engineers and technology leaders have had to keep up with the pace of change, which is no small challenge at large and dispersed organizations.

“We’ve enabled [our field journalists] to work from anywhere, and now it’s up to individual newsrooms to determine where and when people work,” Mike Palmer, senior director, media management, Sinclair Broadcast Group said at TVNewsCheck’s NewsTECHForum in New York City on Dec. 13. “We are providing our newsrooms with the tools that they need to use in the way that they want to use them.”

“If there’s a position in the TV studio that needs to be decentralized to function independently and quickly, it’s the field journalist,” said David Burke, CTO, Gray Television. “We all have an increasing demand for more and more original content and the only way you are going to get more and more original content is to get more and more stories. The less time you can add to field journalists’ work regarding ‘how do I transfer this file back,’ ‘how do I edit it,’ ‘how do I connect live,’ then obviously the more content they can create.”

Although it’s relatively easy for field journalists to shoot in the field — whether from lightweight high-definition ENG cameras or smartphones — the challenge is in editing that video and then sending large files securely back to home base.

“Remote is where everyone wants to be,” said Craig Wilson, global media and cloud product evangelist at Avid. “It’s about trying to enable the teams that are out working in the field … to have the same tools they would have if they were in the building.

“We’re trying to make it much easier to share content back to base and from the base back to the field,” Wilson said. “It’s an ongoing process; it’s not something that is fully there yet.”

Station groups like the idea of working in the cloud, but just making the move from client-based systems that are securely contained on laptops to cloud-based solutions is not so simple.

“The workflow needs to be as seamless as possible,” Palmer said. “If we are going to work more in the cloud in the future, we need different workflows. Just replicating what we do in the cloud with what we do right now isn’t getting us that far. What we’re working on is having connectivity directly from the camera in the field back to the newsroom. That takes a step out of the process and that’s a fundamental change in the workflow.”

Like shooting in the field, editing in the field is something that’s been happening for a while, Burke said. Gray equips its multimedia journalists with laptops loaded with 32-bit Grass Valley editing software. Once videos are edited, journalists send the completed pieces back to the studio using any one of a number of possible networks: 3G, LTE, 5G, hot spot or wifi, depending on what’s available.

“To me, video editing in the field is a fairly mature technology that most stations are taking advantage of,” Burke said.

That said, some stations are looking at cloud-based editing software versus client-based software, with both offering pros and cons. Cloud-based software means the final product is already uploaded so that the studio can just grab it and go, while client-based editing assures that editing can happen even if connectivity is limited.

Considering how much video content field journalists are producing daily, another challenge station engineers face is sorting and storing all of that content so that it is accessible for future use. Applying metadata to every piece of content seems like a nitpicky ask, but it’s essential for content creators to include so that producers and editors can quickly locate video.

“Video without metadata is a liability, not an asset,” Palmer said. “Too many of our vendors do not pass the metadata through. It has to be passed down through the editing, transcoding and distribution systems and even downstream from that. Too many of our broadcast products are very effective metadata filters.”

Palmer and other news producers are working with a group called C2PA that is a collaboration between companies including Microsoft, the CBC, the BBC and others. The goal of the project is to provide technical mechanisms that allow descriptive metadata to be passed automatically from the camera through production, transcoding and distribution.

“If it can’t flow through to downstream systems, then it’s all been for naught,” Palmer said.

Station groups also are moving to put more of their workflow and media asset management systems on the cloud, although that’s a work in progress, panelists said.

“Cybersecurity is putting its thumb on workflow,” Burke said. “We are trying to transition these things to zero-trust type applications. Most of the newsroom control systems have some sort of lightweight client that journalists can load and install.”

“We are looking at moving our newsroom computer system [NRCS] and other tools to the cloud,” Palmer said. “Many of the traditional and established vendors are not yet cloud native. It’s an interesting dichotomy — established vendors have well-established feature sets that everyone is used to. Cloud native applications tend to lack full feature sets. We’re really looking for that convergence where either the established vendors refactor their applications and make them cloud native or you get the new cloud native systems that round out their feature set. We’re looking for one of those two camps to basically win the race.”

As all of this comes into play along with all of the different ways news and content are now being distributed, station news producers have quite a bit with which to contend. That’s required some groups to bring in change management and training to help employees adapt quickly.

“I don’t know what’s more of a dirty word — metadata or change management,” Burke said. “We just started a pretty formal training platform in-house that we had already done for the sales department and now we’re starting to do basic video training that’s Gray specific.

Recruiting and training go hand in hand, he added, noting that Gray has opened a media training center in Jackson, Miss.

“Change management is difficult for both the managers and the employees,” said Rich Paleski, director of operations, WCBS New York. “If you are going to ask someone to do something differently, there should be a benefit to them or to the product they produce. We do a good job of training the tech people when a new technology is available. Filtering that down to everybody is something that requires more formal training. It’s difficult to do because you are asking everyone to stop what they are doing and attend a training session.”

To manage that problem, Sinclair has been breaking up training into much shorter segments.

“Rather than doing traditional monolithic training, we’ve been breaking everything into 30-second chunks and then we link to it in the context of where I’m at in the user interface,” Palmer said. “We’ve had a lot of success with that.”

Looking ahead, TV stations are flipping the switch on ATSC 3.0, which should help advance some of these efforts, especially when it comes to compression and encoding.

“From the newsroom perspective, you’ll see our linear signal in NextGen look more like our current digital streams,” Burke said. “And because NextGen is geolocated, we’ve been doing this test with our digital software developers — if you take the ZIP code from the TV set and apply it to the broadcast app, we can then serve up archived video to viewers that is specific to their community.”

“ATSC 3.0 will allow us to put out more streams using fewer bits, allowing us to free up streams,” Palmer said. “There are lots of things that the newsroom can do to engage around NextGen.”

Besides ATSC 3.0, TV station group engineers are also looking at technologies like bonded cellular and Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite network for two-way secure connectivity in the field.

“We’ve all talked about how it would be useful to link a bonded cellular system to Starlink or some other little [low earth orbit satellite] system — well, I saw this work,” Paleski said. “Sometimes there are bandwidth issues, but what I saw was 18 megabits per second (mbps) upstream, 120 mbps downstream. With that kind of bandwidth and promise, I think we need to get involved with this.”

For more NewsTECHForum 2022 stories, click here.

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The proliferation of enabling technologies like low-latency JPEG-XS compression and the NDI transport protocol are making production in the cloud much more feasible, according to top engineers who assembled for the webinar Technology Predictions for 2023, moderated by this reporter. And they see the growing adoption of 2110 on-premise IP routing hardware as helping to boost the cloud’s production prospects, instead of competing with it.

“I think next year is the year where cloud production might actually become viable, at least at smaller scales,” said Peter Wharton, chief strategy and cloud officer for monitoring vendor TAG Video Systems. “We’re starting to see a lot of the technology align. JPEG-XS is becoming more commonplace, we’ve got some nice high-quality, low-latency feeds into the cloud and the tools are there. So, this might be the year where that works.”

While the coverage is not being produced in the cloud, Wharton noted the importance of Fox’s successful broadcast of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, where the network is using JPEG-XS and 2110 technology in Qatar to deliver all feeds to its cloud-based U.S. broadcast centers. He said other networks are considering making JPEG-XS a key part of their everyday operations.

“There are a couple of networks I’ve been working with who are actually thinking about placing 2110 at the core of their network with JPEG-XS, which really allows them to flatten their entire operations,” Wharton said. “No more encoding and decoding cycles to go from New York to Washington, but just have everything JPEG-XS at the core and get rid of the latency, to be able to share content much easier, be able to send to the cloud and reduce your network footprint by 90% when you do that.”

Imagine Communications President Steve Reynolds, whose company sells 2110 routing systems as well as cloud control software, is seeing the same trend. He said that delays in some big 2110 routing installations due to supply chain problems during the COVID-19 pandemic definitely spurred some broadcasters’ move to cloud technology. But now that supply chain issues have improved somewhat, he is seeing customers who want to use 2110 and the cloud in combination.

“One of the areas where we’ve seen advancement is JPEG-XS contribution into the cloud,” Reynolds said, “the ability to actually use 2110 production on the ground, and then use JPEG-XS as the contribution mechanism to move that stuff up into the cloud for production and ultimately master control origination. That has actually accelerated.”

Tim Joyce, SVP, engineering for Fox Television Stations, said the Fox network had been closely tracking the evolution of JPEG-XS for years before deciding to go all-in with the public cloud by building new broadcast centers in Tempe, Ariz., and Los Angeles in partnership with cloud platform AWS. [Joyce was SVP of media and broadcast engineering at Fox Corp. until moving to the station group in January.]

“At Fox Sports that was one of the things we really weighed heavily, looking at JPEG-XS, because we wanted to get in the cloud space,” Joyce said. “That was really the determining factor, when that became available, and all the vendors started jumping on board we knew that was definitely the way to go. We couldn’t be doing what we’re doing at the World Cup today without it.”

Joyce is now focused on how the cloud can aid production at the Fox stations, where he would like to use customized cloud-based tools to quickly spin up remotes with a minimum of equipment for small productions and special events “where we don’t have to rely on so much infrastructure, and we’re able to get to places and locations where we can’t get today,” Joyce said. “That is the future.”

Sinclair Broadcast Group is already successfully using the public cloud for its content ingest pipeline and by the end of next year plans to transition most of its playout to the public cloud as well, said Mike Palmer, SBG senior director, media management. And now the company is exploring how it can use the cloud to transform local news production.

While Sinclair plans to implement 2110 routing at its larger stations when their current HD-SDI infrastructures are due for replacement, Palmer said, the group is looking at “the possibility of skipping that” for its smaller outlets. It is already running a test control room in the cloud today, which it is feeding with NDI and SRT sources.

“For our small stations if we take SRT or NDI feeds from the ground up to the cloud, we can simply switch the entire program in the cloud and deliver it back to the transmitter and not have to worry about 2110,” Palmer explained. “And these NDI or SRT feeds give us the ability to rather economically bring those contribution feeds in for smaller stations. Even for the larger stations, doing much of that in the cloud is very attractive right now using those technologies.”

Beyond exploring further use of the cloud, the rollout of the new ATSC 3.0 transmission standard is the big priority for both Fox and Sinclair in 2023. Fox, which is already running 3.0 “lighthouse” stations in Los Angeles, Houston and Orlando, Fla., views the move from MPEG-2 to HEVC compression that comes with the 3.0 transition as being imperative for its business, particularly given the continued growth of diginets that have maxed out 1.0’s capacity.

“I think this would also help even our MVPD partners, to have a signal that could come in and handle all of the innovations that we’re seeing in HDR and 1080p, things we can’t currently do on MPEG-2 without really hindering how much bandwidth we have,” Joyce said. “And ultimately [with] UHD, the only way you can do that over-the-air is through 3.0.”

While 4K video and immersive audio are powerful improvements that 3.0 can deliver, public broadcasters may be less interested in those aspects than their commercial counterparts, cautioned Stacey Decker, SVP, innovation for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He said that given their public safety and educational mission, as well as budget constraints, noncommercial stations are more likely to choose content quantity over video quality when it comes to their 3.0 broadcasts.

“It’s the age-old debate for us, it’s quality versus quantity,” Decker said. “You can do one or the other, you can’t do both.”

Decker would also like to hear more from the broader technology community about concrete plans for non-traditional applications of 3.0’s robust data pipe.

“I do hope in the coming year and maybe even the next 24 months we see some technology providers look at 3.0 and start to solve the problems with the promise of 3.0,” Decker said. “There’s the obvious stuff that comes along with it, the better-quality video, the better-quality sound, but what can we do with this broadcast infrastructure to start solving problems in other areas?

“We’re going to have to diversify the use of those systems to keep them relevant,” he said. “I don’t think content distribution is the only thing they can do to stay relevant in the future.”

The post Live Production In The Cloud Is ’23 Goal appeared first on TV News Check.

Panelists are Dave Burke, CTO, Gray Television; Mike Palmer, senior director, media management, Sinclair Broadcast Group; Rich Paleski, director of operations, WCBS New York; and Craig Wilson, global media and cloud product evangelist, Avid. Mike Fass, VP broadcast services, VUit, will moderate the 4 p.m. discussion at the New York Hilton.

“Broadcasters will need to adopt dramatically new ways of reporting, producing and distributing news content to keep up with the enormous pressure they’re now under to produce more of it,” said TVNewsCheck Editor Michael Depp. “Dave, Mike, Rich and Craig will share the many ways in which they’re making a run at those changes, from new ways of working in the field to the cloud’s increasingly important role and how change management among staff — and changing roles for many staffers — will see this industry into its next phase.”

NewsTECHForum’s theme for 2022 is Reimagining the News and How It’s Made, and panels include Blowing Up the Newscast in Order To Save It; Creating More Content For A Multimedia Audience; Building Tomorrow’s News Studio & Workflows; Reinventing News Presentation & Presenters in a Multimedia Ecosystem; and Field and Remote Production’s Multiplying Options and the Quest for More Stories. The keynote interview is Radical Moves: Inside CBC’s Reinvention of TV News. The event is co-located with the Sports Video Group Summit.

Register here for NewsTECHForum.

The post NewsTECHForum: New Frontiers In News Production appeared first on TV News Check.

Topics will include the industry’s historic and ongoing move from hardware to software and on-prem to the cloud, the increments likeliest to be realized in the next year and the challenges in the process. Panelists will also tackle cybersecurity, SMPTE 2110’s evolving standard, the convergence of broadcast technology and the internet of things and the numerous fronts that streaming has opened up.

“Broadcast technologists have so much on front of them to work through in the coming year,” said TVNewsCheck Publisher and Co-Founder Kathy Haley. “Another priority is how to build the right IP network and what will be moving into the cloud in terms of production and playout, major questions that will also figure into their predictions.

“This annual webinar has been enormously popular and for good reason—it’s a free-ranging conversation that helps attendees frame up their own thinking for the year ahead,” she said.

Register for Technology Predictions for 2023 here.

Speakers:

Stacey Decker

Stacey Decker, SVP of Innovation and System Strategies, Corporation for Public Broadcasting —He is responsible for the development and implementation of a multi-faceted strategy to advance innovation and sustainability of public media through accelerating public media’s digital transformation.

A strategic and creative thinker with more than two decades of innovative leadership in public media, Decker is helping CPB develop and create strategies and services to assist the public media industry in many areas, including implementing and leveraging the new NextGen TV broadcast standard.

Before coming to CPB, Decker was president of Public Media Management, a media management and content distribution service, and chief technology officer at Signal Infrastructure Group, which builds and operates the physical and digital infrastructure to enable all broadcasters — commercial and public — to leverage the full power and revenue opportunities of NextGen TV, ATSC 3.0.

From 2013 to 2019, Decker was chief technology officer of WGBH Boston, playing a key role in evolving the organization’s strategic planning, production, audience development and technology direction. For 11 years before that, Decker held technology leadership roles for Nebraska Educational Telecommunication and South Dakota Public Broadcasting.

Decker received his broadcast technology education while in the U.S. Coast Guard. He also served on the PBS Technical Advisory Committee from 2010 to 2016.

Mike Palmer

Mike Palmer, Senior Director, Media Management, Sinclair Broadcast Group — Prior to his current role at Sinclair, Palmer was CTO of Masstech, where he was responsible for defining and overseeing the company’s technical strategies for developing new technologies that allow it to grow its position in existing and new markets.

Palmer is an active contributor to SMPTE standards and is also spokesperson emeritus of the MOS Protocol Group, an organization which he led for nearly 15 years which was awarded a 2017 Technology and Engineering Emmy. Palmer is also a recipient of Broadcasting + Cable‘s Technology Leadership Award. Both awards recognize the impact of technical standards and highly integrated systems on the work done every day by thousands of journalists around the world.

Prior to Masstech, Palmer worked for the Associated Press, where he was director of ENPS design and integration strategy. Earlier, Palmer held both editorial and technical management positions at the local, group and national levels in the U.S.

Tim Joyce

Tim Joyce, SVP of Engineering, Operations and Technology, Fox Television Stations — Prior to joining FTS, Joyce spent nearly three years as the SVP of media and broadcast engineering for Fox Corp. Previously, he was the SVP of technology business relations for Fox Networks Group in Los Angeles, and before that, was VP of broadcast operations for Fox Networks Group in Europe and Africa.

Joyce spent six years as VP of operations and production services for National Geographic Channels International. He began his career as a senior editor for Fox Latin American Channels. A graduate of the University of Southern California, Joyce holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in international relations and Spanish.

Steve Reynolds

Steve Reynolds, President, Imagine Communications — Imagine Communications is a global provider of multiscreen video and ad management solutions that broadcasters, networks, video service providers and enterprises around the world rely on to support their mission-critical operations.Reynolds brings 25 years of technology leadership in the video industry to Imagine Communications. He previously was CTO at both Imagine and Harris Broadcast, SVPO of premises technology at Comcast, SVP of technology at OpenTV and CTO at Intellocity USA.

Reynolds earned a M.S. in computer engineering from Widener University and a B.S. in computer science from West Chester University of Pennsylvania. As the chairman of the AIMS Alliance and a member of SMPTE and SCTE, he has participated in numerous standards-making bodies in the cable and digital video industries. Reynolds also holds more than 40 patents relating to digital video, content security, interactive television and digital devices.

Peter Wharton

Peter Wharton, Chief Strategy and Cloud Officer, TAG Video Systems —TAG Video Systems makes all-IP monitoring systems. Wharton is the founder of Happy Robotz LLC, a media technology engineering, development and consulting company that focuses on creating transformative cloud-based media operations through intelligent, cost-managed and highly automated end-to-end workflows and led the cloud migration project for a major U.S. network.

Wharton has also held a range of live production, product management, technology innovation and business development roles at Grass Valley, Fox and ABC Networks.

He is a SMPTE Fellow and has previously served as SMPTE’s membership VP, secretary-treasurer and Eastern regional governor and has produced the Bits by the Bay SMPTE technology conference in the Washington, D.C., area since 1999.

Glen Dickson, contributing editor at TVNewsCheck will moderate.

The post TVN Webinar: Technology Predictions For 2023 appeared first on TV News Check.

Those were the key takeaways from Storage, the Cloud & Optimizing Content Management, which featured content management experts from Sinclair Broadcast Group, Hearst Television, Warner Bros. Discovery, Vice Media Group and Vizrt and was moderated by this reporter.

Sinclair’s Head Start

Sinclair already has a significant portion of its archives and media management in the cloud. It moved the central archives for its 16 regional sports networks to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud platform last fall and is now in the process of moving regional storage to the cloud as well, said Mike Palmer, senior director, media management for Sinclair Broadcast Group.

Across Sinclair’s TV stations a good number have already completely moved their archive to the cloud, while the remainder are in a hybrid mode where they are still migrating their legacy tape libraries. Palmer estimates that migration process will be completed by the first or second quarter of 2023. The company is also receiving and processing its syndicated programming and commercials through the cloud today.

Palmer said that new remote workflows created during the COVID-19 pandemic helped prove the efficacy of cloud storage.

“The key to all of that was to make sure the users that were operating on-prem and in different random locations as they were working from home had uninterrupted access to that content, and at the end of the process they either had the same access or better access as they had before,” Palmer said. “In most cases, they had better access.”

Advances in compression technology and better visibility into how to “tier” storage at different bit rates is making the cloud more affordable. While Sinclair’s RSNs initially stored its legacy archive material at 50 megabits per second using MPEG-2 compression, it wound up storing them in the cloud at 17 Mbps using MPEG-4, with no visible impact on image quality. With news content, Sinclair is able to drop down from a 35 Mbps production bit rate to 8 to 10 Mbps for archive storage.

“That dramatically reduces storage costs, especially over the long term,” Palmer said.

Palmer expects that the end state for Sinclair’s operations will see most operations winding up in the cloud, including playout. But he emphasized the importance of metadata in making that shift.

“If you don’t have metadata, you can’t find the content, and if you can’t find the content, it doesn’t have value,” Palmer said. “So that’s a major concern for us. Some of the content we have received through acquisitions doesn’t have a lot of metadata on it. So, we’re going through lots of processes to make sure we have more complete metadata with that.”

Hearst Stresses Metadata Importance

Hearst Television began archiving its news content in the private cloud over a dozen years ago when it made the shift to file-based production. Over the past five years it has been archiving promos and other non-news content in the cloud as well, said Joe Addalia, director of technology projects for Hearst Television. The group has also started the process of digitizing legacy content that was stored on tape or film at individual stations, with an eye to eventually moving that to centralized cloud storage as well.

That time-consuming work has been completed at about a half-dozen stations to date, said Addalia, who echoed Palmer in emphasizing the important of metadata in achieving an efficient archive.

“The most important thing is to be able to find what you’ve archived,” Addalia said. “Notice I didn’t say ‘search’ — because you can always search — but the real goal is the ‘find.’ In our news world, we’ve done very well at that. We have a good metadata set and good taxonomy to link to our editorial system, ENPS. So, we can certainly find our news archive quite well and restore [content] as needed.

“That find piece is so important. It’s not the technology, it’s the user being able to find what they need almost immediately and then have it at their disposal,” he said.

Vice’s Centralized Cloud Archive

Vice Media Group has found the public cloud to be a unifying force for a rapidly growing company with offices spread around the globe and diverse production teams including branded operations, studios and documentary crews in the field. The company has centralized its archive in the cloud with a common technology stack available across all of its locations, said Dominic Brouard, director, media engineering for Vice. It now has the agility to quickly shift a production from one office to another, such as from London to New York.

“When it comes to content management and adopting the cloud, it really was a great opportunity for us to try and centralize from many different offices into a single location without necessarily investing a huge amount of infrastructure in one given place,” Brouard said. “It’s sort of democratized the technology a bit to our offices regardless of the scale, because it meant the same technology solution was being offered up even to the offices that had far fewer productions.”

Warner Bros. Discovery Bullish On Cloud Migration

The company Renard Jenkins works for grew a lot bigger this past April, when Warner Bros. completed its merger with Discovery. As SVP, production integration and creative technology services for Warner Bros. Discovery, Jenkins is steering archiving and content management for the company’s Hollywood film and entertainment studios while helping to integrate technology with the broadcast side, where Discovery was an early adopter of cloud playout. Jenkins said that Discovery’s technology leadership has been very open in sharing workflows and steps they took in their cloud migration.

“They are definitely bullish in this area, while legacy Warner Media, and now Warner Bros. Discovery, was a little more cautious,” Jenkins said. “Especially on the film production side where cloud workflows have been explored and there have been a lot of POCs, but not a lot have been adopted in that space right now mainly because of security concerns.”

Jenkins said there are there are a lot of options for cloud technology to help WBD’s film business, including HLS [Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming] playout and using the cloud for remote editing, and that the newly combined companies are working to identify “best of breed” technologies from both groups for use on both the studio and broadcast sides. Some film production functions like high-end visual effects creation are likely to remain on on-premise hardware and storage. But workflows like viewing dailies can be accomplished very efficiently in the cloud today, Jenkins said.

While security continues to be the main priority for high-value film content, the pandemic forced the Hollywood production community to dive in and stop testing some workflows and put them to day-to-day use, he added.

“How we can do it securely through the cloud is what our focus is on,” Jenkins said. “But those are workflows that are starting to see a little more push behind them.”

Hybridity Abounds

Paulo Santos

Media asset management (MAM) vendor Vizrt has some customers that are cloud native, like Amazon Prime Video, and others like TV Globo that are traditional broadcasters that have aggressively shifted most of their operations to the public cloud. But most of the company’s broadcast customers are in a state of transition with a hybrid architecture that mixes cloud and on-premise storage, said Paulo Santos, senior solutions architect for MAM and cloud for Vizrt.

As broadcasters look to move their workflows into the cloud, Vizrt recommends they perform careful due diligence, and ideally, take a multi-cloud approach that spreads storage and compute across different vendors in order to achieve redundancy. But they need to look beyond the cloud platforms themselves, Santos said.

“One customer can choose two cloud providers, but if they are using the same telecom infrastructure you’re not protected,” Santos said. “So, you need to double-check this, such as what kind of fiber connections they’re using. You have to guarantee if you have a failure on Cloud Provider One, that you’re going to be able to reach your content on Cloud Provider Two. That’s what we recommend to our customers. There’s a very deep study that needs to be done, but in the end, you can guarantee very good security and reliability in your system.”

While Sinclair uses a hybrid cloud approach, just doing that alone isn’t enough to guarantee reliability, said Palmer, who agreed that a careful analysis of the overall system architecture is required. He noted that some broadcast vendors might put their control plane in one cloud and their data plane in another, such as their control plane in Google Cloud Platform [GCP] and their data plane in AWS. That means that if there is an outage in GCP that knocks out the control plane a customer’s application isn’t going to run in AWS, even though there might be reams of compute resources that are unaffected by the outage. Without the control plane, the customer still wouldn’t have access to them.

“So, you put things in both clouds or in hybrid, you may think you’re more secure but you’re not,” Palmer said. “It all depends on your architecture. It’s a much more complicated environment with many levels of subtlety, and you really need to take a look at how your vendors are working in that environment and what interdependencies they might have.”

The post Broadcasters Tap Cloud For Content Management appeared first on TV News Check.

Sinclair Broadcast Group turned to the public cloud for help when it was hit by a ransomware attack in October that encrypted servers and workstations at its stations and rendered them unusable, including key news production functions like Avid editing systems. With projected downtimes ranging from weeks to months, Sinclair needed a quick solution, so the group used Sony Ci, a file-sharing system that runs on the AWS cloud and is popular with movie studios, to get back up and running, said Mike Palmer, senior director, Media Management for Sinclair, during the panel The Cloud & the Future of News Production.

“It creates thumbnails and proxies and gives you some nice tools for downloading,” Palmer said. “It’s generally intended to support about 30 users at most.”

Sinclair had been using Sony Ci in its regional sports networks (RSNs) to trade content and already had an account. He contacted Sony to ask them if they had any concerns about using it enterprise-wide at Sinclair, and they said they didn’t.

Palmer set it up so anyone invited to use Sinclair’s Ci account could invite anyone else, provided they had a Sinclair email address. He started with five email addresses “and threw them into the wind.” Within a few hours, there were 3,000 Ci users across Sinclair.

The Ci system lets anyone in the shared workspace do anything with any of the content, which Palmer called “a complete nightmare” for media managers. And Sinclair did have a major scare when one staffer inadvertently sent 15,000 files to the trash. But Palmer was able to recover them, and the group is still using Ci today as it gradually restores its normal production systems.

While Palmer doesn’t view Ci as a long-term replacement for those systems, the cloud-based solution has probably earned a permanent place in the group’s toolbox.

“It’s a simple tool,” Palmer said. “And I think the lesson for us is that users are looking for very simple tools, and many of the tools that we have right now may have more functionality than we really need that we’re paying for. So, one of the lessons that we’re taking out of this is, let’s look for simple tools that provide people the functionality that they need.”

Broadcasters have traditionally done an impressive job in hardening their systems against natural disasters like tropical storms, said Paul Capizzi, CIO and SVP technology, Fox Corp. But ransomware has changed the way they need to think, said Capizzi, who views the cloud as a “perfect opportunity” to provide backup.

“If you think about ransomware, you have to build your environment from scratch,” Capizzi said. “First, you have to make sure your environment is safe to do so.”

The Fox Owned Stations have already been virtualizing as many of their news production systems as possible to run on on-premise COTS hardware. Fox still wants to run that technology locally, Capizzi said, but then use the cloud as a disaster recovery system to store backups of those systems.

“When we say backups I’m not just talking about content, I’m talking about backing up our virtualized sessions,” Capizzi said. “That includes the operating system, configuration of the operating systems, the application and all of the many components that make up a configuration of an application. So, if I were to backup that VM session to AWS, now in the event of a situation such a ransomware attack, we could pull that content, pull those sessions down as backups and restore to our current state.

“The beauty of that type of strategy is that as your team is constantly making changes to the platform, you’re constantly synching up those config changes to the cloud,” he said, “so you have an opportunity to restore the systems in a quicker manner.”

Of course, the public cloud is not immune to its own business continuity problems, which have tended to be ones of availability instead of security. On Dec. 7, AWS had a major outage in its East Coast region that affected several media customers including Amazon’s own Prime Video service and Disney+, as well as Sinclair. And AWS’s West region had a much smaller outage last Wednesday.

Bitcentral COO Sam Peterson noted that many customers have assumed that if a system is running in public cloud, it will be “highly available,” but the recent outages prove otherwise. But he said there are steps broadcasters can take to protect themselves.

“It’s really how we architect it that makes it secure,” Peterson said. “And certainly, from an application perspective, database perspective and then content, there are multiple different strategies.”

For one thing, broadcasters should make sure they’re not tied to just one zone or region within a public cloud platform, Peterson said. And they should also consider the pros and cons of running different workflows across different cloud platforms, a point echoed by Palmer.

Tegna has already moved much of its linear and OTT playout to the cloud, using both public and private platforms, and the group has a long-term goal of moving news production there as well. But first, Tegna CTO Kurt Rao would like to see broadcast vendors improve the security on their existing products, including patching up longtime vulnerabilities that could make them a target.

“There are some that you can’t patch,” Rao said. “Those are vulnerabilities, where we use the expression, ‘Every day is a gift from God that you don’t get hacked.’ ”

To make the cloud more reliable, Rao would also like see broadcast vendors develop their software to easily run across different platforms.

“When I say multi-cloud, I’m going to make a distinction,” Rao said. “It’s not that I can run my environment on AWS or on [Microsoft] Azure, or on whatever. We’d look for a service that runs across all of those, that’s seamless to us as a customer, and we don’t care where it runs. But if one goes down for operational reasons, it automatically switches over and it’s seamless to us.

“That may be the new reality going forward — that we’re going to ask our vendors to not only be secure, but to really go down this path of providing redundancy to their infrastructure,” Rao said.

For more stories on NewsTECHForum 2021, click here.

The post Broadcasters Eye Cloud As Disaster-Recovery Solution appeared first on TV News Check.

Paul Capizzi, CIO and SVP technology, Fox Corp.; Kurt Rao, CTO, Tegna; Mike Palmer, senior director, media management, Sinclair Broadcast Group; and Sam Peterson, Bitcentral, will join moderator Glen Dickson, TVNewsCheck contributing editor, for the 1 p.m. ET discussion, which will be in person at the New York Hilton as well as virtually.

“Broadcasters have been moving storage and editing into the cloud,” said Kathy Haley, TVNewsCheck’s publisher and co-founder. “Our panel will talk about how that’s going, while considering next steps, costs and other issues.”

In-person attendees 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; Reinventing the Live Shot; Remote Production and the Future of News Storytelling; 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.

For more stories on NewsTECHForum 2021, click here.

The post News Production’s Journey To The Cloud In Spotlight At NewsTECHForum appeared first on TV News Check.

The importance of content management has become even more pronounced during the COVID-19 pandemic, as stations and networks have turned to their archives to help fill airtime in the absence of regular news and sports production and relied on content sharing to support distributed workflows.

Broadcasters are tackling the content management challenge by using cloud storage where it makes financial sense and leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tools to make indexing and searching through archive content via metadata more efficient. At the same time, they are taking advantage of improved compression techniques to lower the bit rates required for high-quality storage and transmission, as well as making some well-educated bets on how much a certain piece of content will get reused.

WarnerMedia is working toward a content management future where a shared taxonomy will be used across its diverse array of programming. For now, the media conglomerate is focused on taking the highest-quality original product into its archive, whether it’s news, TV, film or sports content, and then tagging it with the most accurate metadata possible, said Renard Jenkins, the company’s VP, content transmission and production technology.

Renard Jenkins

“The next thing we look at is [whether] this something that’s going to have legs for us to bring back and utilize over time,” Jenkins said. “If it is, then we separate that out into a different tier. If we do believe it may be a historical thing that we may bring out now and then, then we do put into a deep archive, but as we do, we make sure that we’re focused on the tagging portion of all of this.”

Jenkins was one of several broadcasters and technology vendors who joined last week’s TVNewsCheck Working Lunch Webinar, “AI, the Cloud and the Future of TV Content Management,” moderated by this reporter.

Sinclair Turns To Sports Archives

During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sinclair Broadcast Group relied on the archive to keep the lights on for its regional sports networks, which it acquired from Fox in 2019 and is currently in the process of moving from its current playout center in The Woodlands, Texas (now owned by Disney) to a new facility at Encompass in Atlanta.

“The games went away, and we had to fill the air with something,” said Mike Palmer, senior director, advanced technology/media management for Sinclair. “We went to the archive for that and started airing a bunch of classic games.”

“That came at a really interesting time for us, because we were in the middle of migrating away from the previous owner to our new facility that we were designing and trying to project what our usage was,” he added. “It threw all of our statistics way out of kilter, when you’re pulling everything from the archive instead of constantly pushing things into it. So that made things interesting.”

Mike Palmer

Palmer is currently involved in an enterprise-wide project to streamline content management across the various Sinclair properties including the local stations, the RSNs (now rebranded as Bally Sports networks) and Tennis Channel, from production all the way to origination.

“We’re working on all these parts of media management at this point, and it is at the core of our business transformation,” Palmer said.

Hearst’s Archive ‘Oasis’

Hearst Television also leaned heavily on its news archives in March 2020 to keep newscasts going amid COVID-19 lockdowns, before the “Zoomasphere” became an everyday acquisition tool, said Joe Addalia, director of technology projects for Hearst Television. For the past eight years, the station group has pushed out all of the stories it uses in a day to cloud storage, which can then be searched and accessed through Bitcentral Oasis, its content sharing platform.

“This was one of the largest resources throughout the early days of the pandemic, before we got our arms around how we cover things and how to stay safe,” Addalia said.

“We were using this ability to reach into each individual station’s archive as well as share day-and-date assets,” he said. “This was all possible because of the way we do it. We actually archive the entire metadata set and story body from our news editorial system, and it stays with that asset as it gets archived. So we have pretty robust systems that allow for drag and drop of moving a story, and also a video asset will follow.”

COVID Revs Up Cloud, AI Workflows

Raoul Cospen

Raoul Cospen, Dalet’s director of product strategy for news, said COVID-19 was an “eye-opener” that accelerated the use of cloud workflows and AI for content management by roughly five years. Dalet is focused on delivering mobility and easy collaboration through its news production and asset management tools. It has developed a new product called Dalet Pyramid, which introduces the “Storytelling 360” approach as a better way to organize collaboration from the story level that unites functions previously siloed in different parts of the broadcast plant.

Storytelling 360 starts with an “umbrella story” that links to multiple versions for different platforms, and then includes all the objects associated with the story including video, pictures, edit decision lists and graphics. It then provides direct access to production tools like ingest and editing directly from the story. Finally, it organizes the overall production workflow, including who is going to shoot video in the field, who is going to create graphics and who is going to handle editing.

“So really the organization to track the progress of your story, the editorial features, the cost of your story coverage, and the progress of it,” Cospen said.

Visibility Into Feeds Is Key

The kind of IP transport provided by LTN Global has helped contribute to broadcasters’ content management challenge, as it makes it that much easier to access and distribute content feeds whether they are coming from a traditional sports venue, a cloud production workflow or a newsroom. LTN is helping its customers through tight integration with newsroom computer systems and content management tools, said Rick Young, LTN Global’s SVP and head of global product.

“The key from our perspective is providing visibility to the dizzying array of feeds that are coming into production environments across a countless number of sources and types of formats of content,” Young said. “How do you provide visibility in one place? That’s number one. Number two is how do you notify the users, the folks that need to know, whether it’s in a story-specific workflow or it’s a more general facility level — how do you let folks know that something of interest is coming into the facility?”

Rick Young

Extrapolating accurate metadata helps solve those problems, though Young and other panelists said maintaining metadata throughout the entire production and transmission chain is challenging. For example, Palmer noted that many production systems strip out geospatial information and other metadata generated by cameras.

Human Errors Mar Metadata

AI and ML tools can be used today to automatically generate metadata, particularly when indexing material stored in the cloud, and reduce errors prevalent when tagging is performed solely by human operators.

“The key to it all is, the less human interaction that we have with metadata, the more accurate it is actually going to be,” Jenkins said. “If we can take the metadata from the camera, from the original source, as we go through our transcodes and actually maintain it throughout the process, then it makes that orchestration layer a lot more powerful and a lot more valuable within the system itself.”

WarnerMedia is currently building ML models to improve discoverability of content, with a focus on its archive. Jenkins said the crucial first step is making sure the metadata is clean and accurate.

Several panelists said that commodity AI tools like speech-to-text can be used very effectively today to generate serviceable metadata, with Addalia calling speech-to-text the “low-hanging fruit with AI” and Cospen describing it as a “game-changer” when used with content recommendation engines. Jenkins cautioned that sometimes speech-to-text tools are inaccurate with different accents and identified that as a place where human intervention may still be required.

Pursuing Cost Effectiveness

While broadcasters are making more use of the cloud for archive storage, the cost feasibility of doing so relates directly to how much they think they will be accessing it. One way some of Dalet’s big station-group customers are cost-effectively taking advantage of the cloud, Cospen said, is to store proxy versions of content in the cloud while keeping high-resolution versions in on-premise storage. That avoids big egress charges for pulling content.

Hearst follows a similar model by storing proxies in the cloud, and sometimes even hosts proxies on low-cost servers within its own wide area network (WAN)

Joe Addalia

“The proxy is a really good way to avoid those cloud egress charges,” Addalia said. “Because a lot of times what we’ll find is that users just like to look at the video. Well, just to look at the video as opposed to use it, a proxy is perfect for that.”

The Pendulum Of Acceptability

Any discussion of storage costs relates directly to a discussion of bit rates and how much compression is appropriate for a given piece of content. The panelists were in agreement that maintaining a high quality “mezzanine” level for future transmission or editing purposes was important, though advanced compression techniques are lowering those numbers. Young noted that the last 14 months have “changed dramatically what people think is acceptable,” and it remains to be seen how much the pendulum will shift back.

“Everybody wants the highest quality at the end of the day, but it’s just not always practical,” Young said. “There’s definitely an acceptance of lower bit rates.”

Jenkins said that MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 content encoded at 8 Mbps could likely be encoded at 6 Mbps using H.265 (HEVC) compression and still yield a high-quality 1080i or 1080p version for archiving. Palmer says MPEG-2 content encoded at 50 Mbps could be compressed to 15 to 18 Mbps with H.264 encoding and give equivalent quality. That would yield a “huge amount” of long-term savings in file sizes and cloud costs over the long term, particularly if Sinclair can play out the mezzanine format directly without having to go through another transcode step.

“Because again, in the cloud we’re being charged for every piece of media movement and every transformation that we go through,” Palmer said. “So it’s really important for us to make sure that we have a standard format that we can use from a deep storage tier, and then bring it all the way back out to playout for us.”

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly refered to Dalet’s Storytelling 360 as a product. It is a facet of Dalet Pyramid.

The post TVN Tech | COVID-Era Content Management Taps Cloud, AI appeared first on TV News Check.

The webinar will feature leading industry engineers from WarnerMedia, Sinclair Broadcasting Group and Hearst Television talking about what they’ve learned as they’ve streamlined production and created new workflows and about where they are in their journey to the cloud. It will be moderated by TVNewsCheck’s Glen Dickson. 

“The pandemic has led many television engineering and IT departments to rethink how to manage vast content libraries and news archives, organizing them for a future with more remote production,” said TVNewsCheck Publisher and Co-Founder Kathy Haley. “At the same time, the rise of streaming has media companies speeding up their move into the cloud, so they can quickly and efficiently spin up or spin down new services to maximize how they monetize their programming. The webinar on May 6 will allow TVNewsCheck’s engineering management audience to hear from three leaders who have been working on these challenges.” 

The Speakers: 

Renard Jenkins

Renard Jenkins, WarnerMedia — Jenkins joined WarnerMedia in early 2020 and is vice president content transmission and production technology. In this role, he oversees teams which support hundreds of global television and feature film productions annually, providing production technologies including studio, post and remote applications, IT and IP solutions, production pipeline services, software defined workflows and more. His teams also manage the strategic direction, content acquisition, IP infrastructure and onsite connectivity for major live events including sports, entertainment and news for all WarnerMedia brands.
 

Jenkins has more than 30 years of experience in the television, radio and film industry. Before leaving PBS in early 2020, he was the VP, operations, engineering and distribution, responsible for the strategic direction and operational management of PBS’s entire media-supply chain. He also created and led PBS’s Advanced Format Center. The mission of the AFC was to explore and develop procedures and standards for the creation, processing and worldwide distribution of advanced formatted and enhanced media, content and metadata through traditional as well as digital distribution platforms. Jenkins was awarded the Innovator of the Year award in 2017 for his cutting-edge work and accomplishments.

Prior to joining PBS in 2010, Jenkins helped design, build and then lead TV One’s production facility that services its marketing, programming, production management, graphics and post-production departments. Prior to that, he refreshed and updated Discovery Communications’ Technology Center, where he also managed five departments and supervised more than 100 employees. While at Discovery, he also served as the operational lead for the implementation of what was then the largest file based Avid Editing/Interplay/ISIS system installation in the U.S.

Jenkins joined Discovery after more than 16 years with CNN. During his tenure, he received two National Emmy Awards, two National Headliner Awards, a Peabody, a DuPont, and a Bronze Broadcast Design Award, as well as many other industry accolades. Jenkins was responsible for helping move CNN into the file-based editing/delivery/archive environment through his R&D/Training work with industry leaders such as Apple, Autodesk, Avid, Adobe, Leitch, Pinnacle, and Sony. His volunteer work with local youth in his beloved Bay Area also earned him a Healthy Image Award from the Local Teamsters Union.  

Mike Palmer

Mike Palmer, Sinclair Broadcast Television Group — He is senior director, advanced technology/media management for Sinclair Broadcast Television Group, which includes 186 local televisions stations and 21 regional sports networks in addition to national media properties. Palmer joined Sinclair’s Advanced Technology group in 2021 after spending 23 years designing products and technology for The Associated Press as director of design and integration strategy, and later as CTO of Masstech.

He holds a BS in broadcasting/journalism from the University of Southern Colorado. Prior to working in the broadcast vendor space, Palmer worked in local news, and later in satellite technology for Hubbard Broadcasting where he was a member of the technical and operations team that first brought satellite broadcasting to the US market.

As a product and technology designer, Palmer applied his earlier hands-on user experience in news and broadcast operations to design products that bridged leading-edge technology, user experience and business objectives. Portions of this technology are now integrated into much of the daily broadcast news produced by local stations, networks and state broadcasters around the world.

For his efforts, he was awarded AP’s Oliver Gramling award in 2004 and recognized by Broadcasting + Cable with a Technology Leadership Award in 2006. Products produced by design groups in which he was a leader have won numerous awards. In 2015 he was selected by his peers in The MOS Protocol Group to formally receive a National Technology Emmy awarded to the group, which he led for nearly 15 years. He and a colleague were awarded a U.S. patent for adaptive and predictive IP data transmission via satellite and other high-latency paths in 2009.

One of Palmer’s challenges at Sinclair is to select and integrate components of a new media management system that will serve Sinclair’s diverse business units. The new system must work across a wide range of technology, production types and unique workflows, and provide a centralized backbone/pipeline on which Sinclair’s transformative businesses can grow.

Joe Addalia, Hearst Television — Addalia is the station group’s director of technology projects, responsible for new technology discovery and implementation surrounding television workflows including news technology and broadcast operations technology. 

Joe Addalia

He joined Hearst with the purchase of WKCF Orlando, Fla., in 2006 and is based there. Additionally, his responsibilities also include the broadcast-related technology for HTV’s Digital Media Group including live streaming video, mobile, interactive tv, second screen and multicasting. Addalia is also HTV’s representative on industry technology committees. 

Before joining Hearst, he was the corporate director of engineering technology for Emmis Communications and was responsible for researching and pinpointing technology for the company’s 16 TV and 25 radio stations as well as overseeing the southeast stations. 

In addition, he was the design engineer behind the Emmis Centralcasting Model and was also responsible for the implementation of centralcasting for the Emmis TV Stations. The facility was among the first in the industry to drive the on-air operations through the use of metadata rather than user-intervention. 

Previously Addalia was corporate director of engineering for Press Communications LLC, a radio and television broadcasting company based in Wall, N.J. During his 12 years with Press, he designed and constructed the studio and transmission facilities for WKCF Orlando, as well as the group’s radio facilities in New Jersey and Florida. He also “signed on” WKCF in 1988 as chief engineer. 

Addalia has been in broadcast engineering for more than 30 years and has hands-on experience in all facets of the technical side of television, radio, digital and cable. He has an Associate in Applied Science degree in television and is a SBE Certified Broadcast Engineer, an active member of SBE Chapter 42 in Central Florida and a member of SMPTE.

Rick Young

Rick Young, LTN Global — A media technology and services executive, Rick Young is SVP and head of global product for LTN Global. He has held senior leadership roles at news organizations, content owners and technology providers ranging from startups to global brands.

Throughout his career, Young has focused on the intersection of media and technology, from content creation and delivery to consumer experience perspectives.

Raoul Cospen

Raoul Cospen, Dalet —  He is a Dalet pioneer and has played an integral role in the company’s transformation over the past two decades to IT-based, fully integrated newsrooms. As director of product strategy for news, he is in charge of revolutionizing Dalet’s solutions for news, sports and fast-paced production, including the implementation of AI-driven tools.

To register, click here.

The post How Will AI And The Cloud Impact The Future Of Content Management? appeared first on TV News Check.

CBS Owned Stations’ Jeff Birch

Jeff Birch, VP of engineering at CBS Owned Stations; Marcy Lefkovitz, VP of technology and workflow strategy at the Disney ABC Television Group; Tom Casey, VP of engineering and technology for the Meredith Local Television Group; and Mike Palmer, CTO of Masstech will join TVNewsCheck technology writer Glen Dickson for a wide-ranging discussion of the looming challenges they face at 11:45 a.m. on Dec. 17.

Disney ABC Television Group’s Marcy Lefkovitz

“The news industry faces remarkable challenges in 2020, from covering a highly contentious election season and generating audience and revenue on OTT to developing monetization strategies that will keep local news viable over the long term,” said Kathy Haley, TVNewsCheck’s publisher and co-founder. “Technology will play a huge role in meeting all of those challenges and this year’s Top Techs panel will offer insights into how all that will play out.”

Meredith’s Tom Casey

The seventh annual NewsTECHForum, set for Dec. 16-17 at the New York Hilton, will bring together engineering, news, production and digital leaders to discuss excellence in news storytelling and challenges in news workflow.

Panels and presentations will tackle Technology and the 2020 Election Coverage; Cybersecurity in the Newsroom and the Field; News Strategies for OTT; Multiplatform Production Without the Pain; and New Frontiers in News Storytelling among other sessions.

Masstech’s Mike Palmer

NewsTECHForum is co-located with the 14th Annual SVG Summit, which gathers more than 1,000 sports video professionals and their technology partners to talk about production excellence in sports television. The SVG Summit is produced by the Sports Video Group and features a technology showcase of more than 75 companies that is open to all NewsTECHForum attendees.

This year’s NewsTECHForum will also feature the second annual Social Media Excellence Awards, recognizing extraordinary engagement and innovation by local TV brands and talent.

To register for NewsTECHForum, click here.

The post Top Techs Eye Tomorrow’s Challenges appeared first on TV News Check.

Hank Hundemer, SVP of engineering for Tribune Broadcasting, has been riding with news crews recently to find “their pinch points” and figure out ways to help. He says metadata is a prime focus.

“We are in a position where we are serving so many platforms and masters, that the reduction in friction in the workflow is really critical.”

So, the question becomes how can you generate metadata easily and without a lot of work, says Hundemer. “I want to reduce the friction. Sometimes the crews are getting so frustrated. They have the story, they have the video, they have the data, and there is some impediment in the way.”

Hundemer, who was speaking on a panel, “Top Technologists on the Bleeding Edge,” moderated by consultant Andrea Berry, CEO of The G.A.P. Media Group, has devised a simple way to generate more metadata from field crews.

L-r: Moderator Andrea Berry, Graham Media’s Michael Englehaupt, ABC’s Tish Graham, Tribune’s Hank Hundemer, Masstech Innovation’s Mike Palmer. (Photo: Jill Altmann)

He’s installed a Bluetooth dock under the seat of news vans, set to a very low power, so that when a journalist leaves the van his or her smartphone automatically disconnects from the network. Those Bluetooth connections and disconnections provide an activity log that can be reconciled later against recorded video and location data.

“When the guy’s phone disconnects from that dock, he’s getting out to shoot something,” says Hundemer. “So then when the video comes back in, you can ask him what is this video, did you shoot it at one of these locations? So you’re lowering the friction associated with getting a right answer.”

Reducing friction in the news workflow is also a top priority for the ABC Owned Television Stations Group, says VP of Broadcast Technology Tish Graham, particularly as ABC expands its OTT and digital efforts.

“I talk about it as moving content across all of our platforms like water, so the end user doesn’t care where it is, or how it gets from point A to point B,” says Graham. “Whether it needs to be a linear piece, or it needs to be OTT or some type of digital piece, we need to build the backend systems and automate them as much as possible to be able to move that content wherever it needs to go, and to be reliable — not just across an individual station, but across the entire group.”

Graham had breakfast with her ABC colleagues this week and says the subject of metadata kept popping up. “We have to draw a line in the sand, starting today — or some of us, starting a year ago — to get as much metadata as you possibly can onto content you’re producing now, for monetization later, to be able to find things, especially for an OTT play, or any kind of digital play,” she says. “Any kind of information you have on that clip is just so important.”

Archives are a different story. ABC stations have archives that are 30 and 40 years old and there is no metadata on that content. So, Graham is investigating cloud technologies as a way to begin generating it.

“You’ll hear many people say you’re sitting on a goldmine,” says Graham. “We may be sitting on a goldmine, but we have no idea what we’re sitting on. But the technology is there now to run speech to text, and to start to figure out what do we have, what can we use, what do we have rights to, what do we not have rights to? Ten years ago, none of us thought about metadata or digital rights. But now it’s front and center of what we do.”

Mike Palmer, CTO of storage management vendor Masstech Innovations, sees many broadcasters wrestling with the question of how to manage content across their archives. In many cases, customers have content stored across multiple locations with a mix of technologies including LTO (linear tape optical), ODA (optical disc archive), public and private clouds.

“The challenge there is how do you make that content discoverable, and once you’ve got it discoverable, how do you move the essence and the metadata?” says Palmer.

“Because what we talk about now is, the metadata is just as important as the essence. How do you make that move across the organization like water? Maybe it’s as a service, so you can choose the applications that fit you best.

“So for instance, providing search across the organization as a service, so you can plug Avid or Grass Valley on top of that, and they don’t have to worry about the details of where things are stored or how they get from Point A to Point B.”

Palmer adds that metadata is not only essential to find content in an archive or to direct OTT distribution. It can also be used adroitly to lower overall storage costs by directing the “lifecycle management” of a piece of content.

“Ninety percent of the archive is probably never going to be used; the 10% that does has to justify the cost of everything else,” he says. “You really have to look at how much money you’re spending on that archive. If it’s in the cloud it becomes very obvious because it’s an operational model there.

“But it’s how much are you spending versus how much are you bringing back. This really leads you into a discussion of what bit rate do I store things [at], and how can I get the cost of that storage down? If the cost of the storage is pretty much fixed, how can I make the file sizes smaller, and when do I do that? And you do that based on the metadata you have associated with the content. So the more metadata you have, not only is your content more likely to be sold, but it’s also more likely to be compressed and cheaper to store over time.”

While artificial intelligence (AI) is likely to come in handy for sifting through content archives, it has a more pressing application in broadcast stations today — closed-captioning, says Graham Media  VP and CTO Michael Englehaupt.

“One of the weak knees in every TV station is closed captioning. And we all have issues with closed captioning. It’s a big target on our back, where the [FCC] will, without too much hesitation, throw out a fine, a hefty one, if you don’t provide captions that are legible and credible. So what do we do as stations?”

Englehaupt notes the choices are relatively cheap hardware-based speech-to-text solutions that sit internally in a station, or outsourcing it to a higher-quality captioning provider. With the advent of cloud-based, AI-driven services, he thinks stations can now afford to do both.

“You can buy the box and sit it in a rack and it becomes an asset, and then you can supplement that with a [IBM] Watson-driven solution that becomes an opex process,” he says. “I think that’s a great opportunity for stations to rethink how they are doing captions right now.”

Here is the link to the video of this session: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoakxHOUrjg

Read all our NewsTECHForum coverage:

IP Tools Complement Old Favorites In TV News

To Win At OTT, Think Programming

OTT Is Top-Of-Mind For CBS’s Christy Tanner

Journalists Bring Digital Aesthetic To Local News

NBC Stations’ Staab Underscores Localism, Tech

How Broadcasters Can Reach Young Viewers

Getting Creative Can Drive Revenue From Social

NBC Stations Expanding IP News In 2019

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