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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more coverage of NewsTECHForum 2023 here.

Watch this session and all the NewsTECHForum 2023 videos here.

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The tech show’s shortened, four-day schedule (Sept. 15-18) was an apt metaphor for this dynamic. Frugality would be too harsh a word to describe the vibe, but efficiency certainly was IBC’s driving inquiry.

The international broadcast industry, groaning under the weight of stubbornly persistent downward market pressure, was clearly on a diet this year.

But that didn’t mean it was all gloomy faces stalking the RAI’s halls, disoriented by its infamous lack of signage. Rather, attendance and energy levels were visibly high. The crowds outside were so thick that even Amsterdam’s throngs of scudding cyclists were compelled to periodically yield.

In its second year back from pandemic hiatus, there was a comforting air of normalcy restored at IBC, and for broadcasters with big upcoming projects slung over their shoulders, there were lots of questions:

• Where and how can efficiencies be found?
• How extensive of a transition to IP- and cloud-based workflows is prudent?
• Where is AI, far more than a buzzword now, impactfully intersecting these workflows?
• How are supply chain issues still having an impact, and when might the Hollywood strikes start having knock-on effects?

And finally, what is this business going to look like in six months to a year’s time?

Bigger Show, More Business

In the final tally, IBC ’23 drew 43,065 attendees, a little short of the 45,000 it projected but a 16% leap over the 37,071 it had last year. A strong number of its returning vendors were doing so in booths that were at least as big or larger, many bringing with them a bigger force than in ’22.

Lawo, the German vendor that returned with a booth resembling a brightly teched-up Black Forest, saw a perpetual scrum of people huddling near its virtual trees. “Basically, since the doors opened it’s been packed, so it feels like 2019,” said a smiling Andreas Hilmer, its CMO.

Alex Keighley, CRO of Telestream, said traffic was “massively busier than last year” when the show kicked off, buoyed by strong contingencies from the Middle East and Asia, from which attendees were largely absent last year.

Ross returned with a booth roughly 25% larger from ’22 and about 30 more staff in tow to showcase a wider array of products. “We brought everything,” said Jeff Moore, SVP and CMO. “There’s nothing like being able to seat them and show them what we’re talking about.”

For vendors like Lawo, for whom the trip to Amsterdam was a short hop, it was a good occasion to bring a larger contingency of junior staff or interns. “It’s a great boot camp for support people,” Hilmer said.

Netherlands-based EVS also cycled a number of its younger people through. “It’s our backyard, so we can invite more people for the day or for the weekend,” said CTO Alex Redfern.

As to operators, however, Ronen Artman, VP of marketing at LiveU, noticed a reversal compared to vendors’ enlarged teams. “The delegations are still coming, but with fewer people than they used to,” he said. But, as Vitec VP of Marketing Bryan Reksten put it, “The right people are here.”

At times over the four days, that translated into sales. “We’ve closed a few deals while we’ve been here,” said Dejero’s Jeremy Miller, global director of technical account managers.

More often, though, it was an opportunity to check in with broadcasters who were somewhere down the long sales path to closing. “These shows are all about continuing customer engagement because sales cycles are longer than six months,” said Carl Fergusson, head of portfolio development at Mediakind. He added that the sales mode itself had shifted to a far more consultative approach rather than pushing a suite of products toward customers, echoing many other vendors at the show.

And IBC offered the ideal, unhurried environment to have those kinds of conversations, said Ken Frommert, president of ENCO. “What’s nice about here as opposed to NAB is we have more time to talk,” he said.

Efficiencies And Value

There was a resolute practicality among attendees, a mindset neatly summed up by Synamedia’s Elke Hungenaert, VP of product management. “The real metric has become profitability, so everyone is now feet on the ground,” she said. “Common sense has come back with everybody.”

For vendors, this meant presenting practical value propositions that came in many different permutations.

For Ross, “hyperconvergence is one of the trends that we’ve been driving,” Moore said. “We put more and more into one system,” which can save money in integration costs and make systems more flexible, he said.

Harmonic emphasized a collapse in functionalities, workflows and applications — “doing more with less products and collapsing more and more things,” said Stephane Cloirec, VP of appliance product management. He said the company is driving more consolidation in its own portfolio, slimming down to a third of its previous product offerings.

Collapsing and consolidating products also had environmental upsides touted by some vendors which, they posited, could lead to further cost savings. Riedel’s Sara Seidel, marketing manager for the Americas, said consolidating multiple applications into one panel was one way to reduce the hardware footprint, and bridging the worlds of IP and SDI is also helping to considerably trim travel costs.

“Travel and time to investigate is money,” agreed Yoann Hinard, COO of quality-of-service monitoring vendor Witbe, making the case that proactive monitoring saves on both.

Accedo’s Frederik Anderson, SVP of products, noted that 15-20% of the larger tier one RFPs his company receives now mention sustainability as a concern, which resonates with the Swedish company. “We’re trying to establish ourselves as a sustainable vendor,” he says, noting his own daughters were classmates of climate change activist Greta Thunberg.

Other Value Propositions

Dalet, which is seeing more broadcaster collaborations in line with the story-centric workflow it has been proselytizing for years, said it was about “making better use of the tools that they have,” said Robin Kirchhoffer, CMO. “As you have a master view of everything you do, you have a better synergy of tools.”

Automation was an important part of the efficiency narrative. “Automation companies have tools that can help media companies do more sophisticated productions with the same amount of people,” said Jim O’Brien, Aveco’s president.

Zixi was emphasizing a dramatic increase in the compute efficiency of its protocol at the show. “Doing more with less is really something we’ve seen over the last six months,” said John Wastcoat, its SVP of marketing and alliances.

Virtual set vendors were making their own case on the value front. One of them was Rolf van Vegten, CMO of Zero Density. “If you implement it well and take a more holistic approach, it’s an opportunity to reduce costs,” he said, noting that graphics integration had become enormously simpler, usually requiring only one person to control the setup. The company planned to take that message to tier two and three companies.

“Cost reduction is one of the best things about virtual production,” agreed Miguel Churruca, marketing director, virtual production, Brainstorm, noting that more mature technology had greatly simplified the process from just a few years ago, enabling even non-skilled operators to use it.

Nik Forman, marketing director of Friend MTS, even had a value proposition for investing more deeply in content security, noting that when the company detects piracy occurring, it can send subscription offers to the users who’ve been caught in the act.

The Hybridity Era

Notably softened in IBC’s overhead signage was the word “cloud,” a concept which had wafted earthward to amalgamate less dramatically with on-premise hardware for a more permanent—or at least indefinite—age of hybridity.

“I don’t feel like I need to evangelize moving to the cloud,” said SDVI CMO Geoff Steadman. “It’s a little more how do I do this and what use cases make sense.”

Steve Reynolds, president of Imagine, also said the need to proselytize the cloud’s value had passed. “We’re kind of through that proof point phase,” he said. “Where we are now is knowledge sharing. The skill sets to design, build and operate these IP-based systems was not widely distributed in the industry.”

Mediaproxy’s Rajesh Patel, VP of sales, EMEA, was deep into navigating cloud costs in client discussions. He said it was all about giving them options. “Does it really have to live in the cloud?” he said. “Can we do a hybrid option?”

Even if cloud’s costs can run higher than on-prem, SwXtch chief strategy officer and co-founder Geeter Kyrazis said there was still an upside to emphasize: “The cloud as a destination for workflow can be more expensive,” he said, but there’s no on-prem equivalent to its flexibility in spinning up pop-ups and new products when they’re needed.

There was a fair amount of assurance-giving at Globecast, where CMO Jean-Christophe Perier said, “There’s a medium level of anxiety with our customers on the pace and scope of transformation they’re going through,” he said. In fact, training and support have become so important that the company has added a consultancy line to its business.

And there was another kind of assurance happening at Grass Valley, which said it had just finished on the early side of a three-year business transformation plan and wanted to emphasize to operators that it was stable and profitable. “We really want to say to everyone that we’re still a hardware and software company, said Chief Product Officer Adam Marshall.

Sports-Related Opportunities

Even while Grass Valley pledged its ongoing allegiance to hardware, Marshall was quick to highlight where SaaS-based opportunities were important, drawing on the rapidly changing landscape of sports rights as a driver.

He said that where some rights used to extend two, three years or more, now they can be as short as a year. Cloud-based services can be spun up or down in literal days, he said, offering some essential flexibility.

Sports came into the conversation in another way for TAG, which noted that the dissembling of the U.S.’s regional sports networks has been a boon to business, where clients among professional leagues and broadcasters are now growing.

“The collapse of the RSNs has given the challenge to networks and leagues to take in content in whatever form they can,” said Robert Erikson, VP of live production. He said older, ingrained workflows have now been challenged, which has also resulted in cost savings. “It took a revolutionary mindset, and now we’re seeing that evolve,” he said.

For Vislink, sports, particularly the Olympics, was likely to spur some late-year shopping among some clients to which it was looking forward. Many would be looking for the “latest, greatest,” and IBC was an ideal venue “where you can prepare a deal and close it by the end of the year,” Michel Bais, chief product officer, said.

AI’s Omnipresence

There was nary a vendor who didn’t field questions about AI with frequency at the show, some of those inquiries being far more honed than others.

Many—if not most—companies have had some form of AI built into their software for years, such as Interra Systems was demonstrating, using with neuro-language capabilities for captioning and translation.

When pressed, vendors speculated that generative AI—the true hot topic within AI’s broad universe—would soon be able to interface with their user manuals and give helpful, flexible directions to clients with questions and troubleshooting needs.

Others, like Newsbridge, were already close to the bleeding edge of generative AI and absolutely giddy to show what it could do. CEO Phillippe Petitpont demonstrated scene description software that took tagging to a new level of complexity and comprehensiveness.

“The sooner you are doing the indexing, the more it will have value,” he said, noting that thorough tagging can save hours when it comes to content retrieval. He added that 99% of Newsbridge’s clients are now using the tool to build stories, a precursor, he teased, to the prospect of AI-edited video — if clients start to ask for it.

Avid was also excitedly looking ahead to AI’s future applications. Shailendra Mathur, VP of architecture and technology, runs the company’s R&D lab. “It’s a steep learning curve for most people because it’s very difficult to separate hype from reality,” Mathur said.

He said it’s critical right now for every vendor to develop responsible AI positions amid the many new concerns it will raise, and he noted that Avid had recently joined the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) coalition to take a proactive role in content authentication. The company was also working with “do not learn” features to keep AI from scraping content without permission.

Supply Chain Improvements And Hollywood Strikes

If generative AI presented some daunting new challenges ahead, at least one major pandemic-era problem was largely turning a corner.

Ciro Noranha, CTO of Cobalt, spoke for many vendors in seeing much more easing on supply lines, though he remained vigilant. “We manage our supply chain very carefully,” he said. “We stock components and have a fair amount of inventory on the shelves. That helped us grow the business because other people couldn’t deliver.”

Brad Wall, CTO of LTN, put a finer point on the recovery. “Writ large it’s better than it was a year ago,” he said, noting delays had shifted from 8-12 months to 3-6 months. But “my gut tells me we’re still a couple of years from getting back to normal,” he cautioned.

While vendors had yet to see adverse effects from the Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes, meanwhile, many felt that the longer they drag on, the likelier they are to impinge on media and entertainment’s intricately connected ecosystem.

“It has an effect of bringing people down generally,” said David Dowling, CRO of Pixotope. But despite a “miasma of feeling” the strikes induced, “it’s probably not as bad as people think.”

The Business Outlook

While the strikes remain, for now, distant thunder for tech vendors, other concerns were more in the foreground. One was the ever-present prospect of mergers and acquisitions. Some companies, like Audinate, weren’t shy to concede that they’re in the hunt. Others, like Aveco, were quick to point out they were debt-free and well shielded from being hunted.

Pixotope’s Dowling said the climate was ripe for more activity. “I think you’re going to see more mergers and acquisitions,” he said. “There’s a general feeling that there are an awful lot of vendors out there and not enough customers.”

Even in the smaller world of fellow virtual production vendors, Dowling foresaw constriction. “The cream will come to the top,” he said. “Generally, it’s healthy. The people doing the most innovative things who have the most solid business model are the ones who are going to thrive.”

And as to business models, Lawo’s Hilmer had some words of caution. “This year looks like it’s becoming a record year,” he said. “However, I would not take this as the new normal.

“Consolidation makes it hard to predict where the post-pandemic norm will be,” he added. “I’m of the conviction that it won’t be where it was before.”

All of which means that tech vendors, like broadcasters, had better heed the law of the jungle and adapt or die. For Synamedia’s Hungenaert, herself a 25-year veteran of the industry, something feels historically different about this moment, the rumblings of which could be felt all around IBC.

“We need to be much more agile, faster and have off-the-shelf solutions that we can give at a faster pace,” she said. “Just like our customers need to reinvent themselves, we need to reinvent ourselves as well.”

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Wacker is a seasoned media industry veteran with over three decades of experience in business development, digital transformation, operations, advertising, as well as content production and distribution. He has held leadership roles across various reputed German broadcasters, production companies, and digital media technology providers, including Adstream, Wildmoka, and Backlight.

Wacker is working on increasing LTN’s market presence and serving the growing client base in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. In his new role, Wacker will be steering LTN’s commercial expansion across the DACH region, fostering customer success, initiating new relationships, and propelling business growth for a range of media clients, including public service broadcasters, content owners, and sports rightsholders.

EVP-Chief Revenue Officer Chris Myers said: “Martin is a respected figure in the media technology space. His vast experience and unique skillset will be invaluable in expanding our footprint in the DACH region.”

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The company said: “Ushering in the future of global media transport with reliable, scalable, and intelligent distribution for high value content, LTN’s industry leading, multicast enabled IP network provides a cost efficient, flexible alternative to traditional distribution mechanisms that drives scale and monetization for content owners worldwide.”

On May 8, LTN managed its one millionth live feed for a live soccer game between Arsenal de Sarandí and Gimnasia La Plata in Argentina’s Liga Profesional de Fútbol. Since its inception in 2007, LTN has delivered live feeds via the LTN Network for primary transmission, testing and monitoring for a diverse range of high value programming including live news coverage, entertainment, political live events, esports and premium live sports events such as the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, NFL Draft 2020, and American Idol.

“Our 1 millionth booking on the LTN Network marks a cataclysmic shift in the status quo of live media delivery as world leading organizations recognize the potential of IP-based distribution,” said Dr. Yair Amir, LTN chief science officer and co-founder. “In an increasingly complex and fragmented market with new business models emerging and new ways of working constantly evolving, multicast enabled, intelligent IP video transport provides the best foundation to underpin the future for any media business. We’re incredibly proud of this milestone and look forward to continuing to innovate with our Network to drive business results for our customers.”

Every live feed delivered via the LTN Network includes built-in insights, rich data and business intelligence to give customers greater visibility and control over their content compared with traditional satellite or fiber-based models. Via the LTN Network portal, “customers can seamlessly access data around viewing metrics, ISP connectivity, signal continuity, packet loss, latency, and last-mile health. LTN’s advanced tools and always on expert TOC support deliver proactive troubleshooting and empower customers to gain a deeper understanding and drive efficiencies throughout every stage of the content value chain,” the company said.

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“The collaboration will enable the organization’s complete transition from satellite to terrestrial IP-based distribution by integrating the fully managed, terrestrial IP-based, live video transmission solution LTN Wave,” said LTN’s statement. “The transition is also a key component to enhance the live sports experience on MSG+, a state-of-the-art streaming product this summer, offering access on a direct-to-consumer subscription and authenticated basis.”

LTN will distribute the MSG Networks channels delivering live coverage of the New York Knicks, New York Rangers, New York Islanders, New Jersey Devils and Buffalo Sabres to fans “while future-proofing the organization’s distribution model and harnessing the full benefits of the LTN Network,” the release said.

The multi-year agreement sees MSG Networks choose LTN for what the company called its own “proven reliability, scalability, and cost-efficient alternative to satellite distribution.”

LTN’s low-latency capabilities with five nines SLA are also critical in today’s live sports broadcasting,” the statement continued. “As a trusted partner, LTN enables MSG to transform its technology roadmap while providing the service layer to drive operational efficiencies and intelligent monetization and distribution capabilities.”

David Schafer, SVP Product, Technology & Operations at MSG Networks, said: “LTN is trusted across the broadcasting and live sports industry. Our partnership with LTN provides us with mission-critical reliability. An IP-first approach to content distribution delivers the foundations for success, with greater business agility and a host of new revenue opportunities. We are truly excited about this next phase of IP-powered content distribution.”

Built on LTN’s multicast-enabled, fully-managed IP transport network, LTN Wave provides a flexible, scalable, and reliable video transport solution that “de-risks satellite migration with end-to-end management and automatic stress-free changeover while supporting next-generation possibilities such as content replacement and custom ad triggers,” said the statement. Its flexibility and efficiency mean Wave can integrate within existing infrastructure while harnessing other solutions such as third-party encoders, decoders, and hardware or software. LTN’s open and agnostic network strategy means customers can acquire content in a single format and deliver in multiple formats, common third protocols, and in and out of public clouds, as needed, said the company.

Through LTN Wave, MSG Networks “benefits from an intelligent, flexible, and cost-efficient content distribution solution,” said LTN.”MSG Networks is best equipped to reliably distribute multiple versions of content to any destination worldwide, enabling it to maximize reach, monetization, and ROI and futureproof its distribution model without technology headaches or heavy CapEx investment.”

“The media industry is steadily moving away from satellite. But mission-critical channels cannot afford to rely on the open internet with billions of dollars in revenue at stake. Customers like MSG Networks need the managed network that LTN offers along with the peace of mind of a 5 nines reliable SLA and a 24/7 TOC,” said Chris Myers, EVP, Chief Revenue Officer, LTN.

“MSG Networks chose LTN because of its industry-leading intelligent and reliable IP network and its managed network services. With LTN Wave, customers can get their content on multiple platforms, opening more pathways than satellite can provide. LTN is thrilled to be working with one of North America’s flagship media companies, empowering it to shift to IP and reach new audiences and revenue streams.”

The post MSG Networks Partners With LTN For Full IP Migration appeared first on TV News Check.

LTN will be displaying its extensive product portfolio that equips customers with the tools that they need to creatively grow audiences and revenue. These services include how IP-based transmission solution LTN Wave provides media companies with flexible, reliable, and intelligent alternatives to satellite distribution. Wave creates next generation distribution and contribution possibilities including the ability to manage complex rights deals and the associated requirements for ad signaling across multiple platforms.

LTN will also showcase LTN Arc, the fully managed, cloud-enabled production solution that handles every aspect of live event versioning for rights holders and sports broadcasters, and LTN Lift, the cloud-based playout solution with automated versioning capabilities to seamlessly spin up new channels and deliver customized programming across digital/OTT/FAST services.

“Amid challenging macroeconomic conditions, it is more vital than ever for businesses to unlock new revenue streams and achieve game-changing efficiencies,” said Malik Khan, LTN executive chairman and co-founder. “LTN keeps its finger on the media industry’s pulse to ensure content providers are empowered with the right technologies to succeed and grow, navigating ever-increasing digital complexity and audience fragmentation. We are looking forward to demonstrating our latest innovation at NAB Show 2023 and discussing the future technology and business trends that will shape our industry’s future.”

LTN will also be participating at the following panels at NAB 2023:

• Brad Wall | TVNewsCheck Programming Everywhere— Wynn/Alsace ballroom (Sunday, April 16, 4:15 p.m. PT)
• Mike Burk and Olek Loewenstein |TelevisaUnivison Case Study — Connect Inspiration Theater (Monday, April 17, at 1:50 p.m.
• Malik Khan and Del Parks | Fireside Chat — Connect Innovation Theater (Tuesday, April 18, 1:30 p.m.)
• TBD and John Footen | Deloitte Fireside Chat — Connect Innovation Theater (Monday, April 17, 4:30 p.m.)

To meet with the LTN team or book at demo at NAB 2023, click here.

The post NAB Show: LTN To Showcase Cloud And IP-Powered Technologies appeared first on TV News Check.

The discussion will consider how to manage audience measurement and targeted advertising, how syndicated programming fits in and where diginets play a part in this strategy, along with the fast-evolving role of professional sports in local programming.

Panelists are Steve Pruett, executive chair, Cox Media Group; Pat LaPlatney, co-CEO and president, Gray Television; Sean Compton, president, networks, Nexstar Media; Adrianne Anderson, SVP of content development and creative services, ABC Owned Stations; and Brad Wall, CTO of LTN. Paige Albiniak, contributing editor, TVNewsCheck, will moderate the 4:15 p.m. panel.

“This closing discussion at Programming Everywhere touches on all of the conference’s most essential ideas — how stations can maximize the ROI of the content they develop and buy; where linear and streaming can find synergies; and where key programming areas like sports, news and syndicated shows will fit into the picture in a period of dramatic change in all those areas,” said Michael Depp, NewsCheckMedia’s chief content officer and TVNewsCheck editor.

“Steve, Pat, Sean and Adrianne are among the top decision-makers in this industry and can share remarkable insights into how their content strategies are evolving around the multiplatform dynamics of the business,” Depp said, “while Brad brings a key voice from the technology side on multimedia content delivery.”

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 Building And Promoting A Content Everywhere Business Onstage At Programming Everywhere appeared first on TV News Check.

Gardner is an accomplished and highly skilled media professional with over 20 years of industry experience, working on the front lines of media distribution and supporting tier-one sports, news, and entertainment customers. With a deep understanding of the global broadcast market and its future evolving needs, she will lead LTN’s commercial expansion across the EMEA region, enabling customer success, driving new relationships, and powering business growth.

Gardner has held several key management roles in organizations, including Intelsat and, most recently, Tata Communications. She brings a wealth of expertise in live broadcasting for major global events and deep experience in helping media companies navigate the transition from satellite to IP-based distribution.

Drawing on her broad skill set, market knowledge, and customer-centric approach, Gardner will enable broadcasters, content providers and rightsholders to reliably distribute and monetize their high-value content efficiently and at scale. Harnessing LTN’s innovative solutions portfolio, built around the company’s industry-leading multicast IP network — the LTN Network, current and new customers across EMEA can seamlessly migrate away from legacy satellite and fiber contribution distribution models. This can be achieved while utilizing a suite of metadata insertion, channel playout, and content versioning services to drive operational and cost efficiencies and unlock wider revenue streams.

Speaking on Gardner ‘s appointment, LTN Co-Founder and Executive Chairman, Malik Khan, said: “Justine’s appointment underlines LTN’s growing presence on the international stage. The EMEA region is an exciting market with endless opportunities and complexities for media organizations. With Justine on board, we’re incredibly excited to empower customers to efficiently version, distribute, and monetize great content across multiple digital platforms, geographies, and cultures. Justine shares our vision for the future of broadcasting and media, and I am delighted to welcome her to the LTN family.”

Gardner will attend NAB Show in Las Vegas (April 15-19) at Booth W2621.

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The awards will be presented at the NAB Show in Las Vegas on April 18 at 6 p.m.

“Nadia Khan’s development of a strategic marketing and communications plan, including digital, social media and demand-generation programs, drove sales while positioning LTN as an increasingly important technology provider to the media industry,” said TVNewsCheck Publisher and Co-Founder Kathy Haley. “Her brand integration of new verticals after LTN made four rapid-fire acquisitions sped up the company’s momentum, while she also developed a new market proposition and marketing strategy.”

Of Emily Stone, Haley said: “Her oversight of a complete overhaul of the Fox TV websites and apps resulted in a better user experience, while adding new features, such as the ability to watch live news from of the Fox markets on each station’s website. The integral role developing and expanding the streaming service LiveNOW from Fox, created an unfiltered look at live news breaking across the U.S.”

Of Hannah Barnhardt, Haley said: “Her development of a production and operational strategy for bringing to market a cloud-native, technology-agnostic operational management platform for media supply chain operational users created an important new option for content creators and distributors competing in a multimedia environment. Her earlier work, at Deluxe Entertainment Services Group, helped to transform the company from a services business to a product and technology driven organization.”

TVNewsCheck’s Women in Technology Leadership Award recognizes women who have contributed substantially toward advancing their industry technologically. It supports the National Association of Broadcasters Education Foundation’s Technology Apprenticeship Program, which trains, informs and recruits a diverse workforce that meets the emerging technology and engineering needs within the broadcast community.

Register here to attend the 13th annual Women in Technology Awards Presentation Ceremony and Reception at NAB Show in Las Vegas.

Previous Technology Women to Watch Award honorees include:

• Kylee Peňa, manager, creative technologies program management, Netflix
• Diane Strutner, CEO and co-founder, Datazoom
• Rose Adkins Hulse, founder and CEO of ScreenHits TV
• Yushi Xu, senior architect, FreeWheel
• Sally Hattori, executive director, product development at Walt Disney Studio’s StudioLAB
• Kate Ketcham, director, Media Composer product management, Avid
• Deb Grivois, director of engineering, WLWT Cincinnati
• Katy Noland, senior R&D technologist, BBC
• Larissa Goerner, director of advanced live solutions, Grass Valley
• Deborah Adeogba, now senior media experience manager, Microsoft
• Jennifer Leung, now senior director at AppD Labs and Emerging Tech
• Anne Marie Rohaly, director of accessibility policy and standards, Microsoft
• Tania Paz, VP of digital media operations and technology, Telemundo
• Yvonne Thomas, now strategic technologist, Digital TV Group
• Sara Kudrle, now marketing director, PESA and VP education, SMPTE
• Alison Neplokh, now VP innovation and strategy, NAB

The post Nadia Khan, Emily Stone, Hannah Barnhardt Named TVN’s Technology Women To Watch appeared first on TV News Check.

The promotions, which are newly created roles within the organization, come as LTN enters a new period of growth and international expansion. LTN said it aims to “unify different parts of the organization to enhance and deepen its connection with the world’s leading content owners, broadcasters and streaming platforms. As a result, customers will benefit from a more strategic alliance and collaboration to meet their needs and solve complex pain points in today’s market.”

LTN says these promotions will help streamline organizational processes and encourage closer cross-company integration, collaboration and accountability.

Nadia Khan, CMO, “will play a pivotal role in LTN’s technology leadership strategy, driving LTN’s customer-centric focus and acting as a bridge between the organization and its customers. Nadia will underpin the shift towards a more data-driven and tailored, partner-led approach, creating greater value for LTN’s customers by better understanding their needs and addressing their problems with industry-leading knowledge and insight.”

As the new EVP of development, Michal Miskin-Amir “will lead a pioneering Architecture Team creating a single development organization that enables LTN to innovate and create the technologies and solutions its customers need, today and in the long run. Michal will oversee LTN’s industry-leading technology development of full-featured, reliable and scalable solutions.”

In her role as general counsel & GM EMEA, Sara Khan will oversee LTN’s legal functions and lead the company’s growth strategy in EMEA from LTN’s Cologne, Germany, office, where she is based. “Sara will focus on building relationships with customers, driving sales, and expanding the company’s core functions in the region, including providing more robust local support and advancing the development of LTN’s technology.”

As chief strategy officer, Roger Franklin will work closely with customers “to design technology strategies to support business growth, conducting extensive research to enhance workflows across the entire video chain. Roger draws on experience building market-leading innovation to tackle some of the media industry’s biggest challenges, including multi-platform versioning of high-value content; content distribution under rights management and other policies; and the seamless migration towards IP- and cloud-based workflows.”

Speaking on the promotions, LTN Co-Founder and Executive Chairman Malik Khan said: “Today’s media landscape is fragmented across thousands of global platforms and devices, and our customers require highly innovative and efficient services from us to help them navigate complexities and reap the rewards of the monetization opportunities that follow. Nadia, Michal, Sara, and Roger are all experts in their respective fields, and their commitment and dedication to LTN have helped the company grow to where it is today. These promotions are not only fully deserved, but they are a testament to the company’s direction.

“Amid fierce competition for viewers, LTN provides customer-first, customized cross-platform solutions for rapidly changing distribution models. We are confident that these new roles will drive our continued focus on innovation, customers, and service excellence.”

The post LTN Announces Senior Leadership Promotions appeared first on TV News Check.

Wall brings more than 25 years of experience in various leadership positions at some of the industry’s leading names. He has worked across media and entertainment technology, production, post-production, digital media and broadcast. He specializes in large-scale broadcast operations and has led OTT and digital media projects while embracing diversity, inclusion and teamwork-based collaboration.

Wall will primarily be externally focused, promoting LTN’s capabilities and solutions to the large media companies, driving transformation and helping customers redefine their workflows and underlying technology foundations.

Speaking on Wall’s appointment, Malik Khan, LTN co-founder and executive chairman, said: “The industry continues to evolve rapidly, and it is essential that LTN remains at the forefront of this change. Brad’s proven track record in live TV production, broadcasting, media engineering, and digital media distribution is perfect for helping LTN achieve its goals. His experience and work with some of the world’s leading media companies made his appointment as our new CTO a no-brainer. We are delighted to welcome Brad to the LTN family, and we are confident that his expertise and insight will help drive us forward into this exciting new chapter for our industry.”

Wall said: “I have long held a passion for digital transformation, streaming technologies and supporting the content engines that drive viewership in our industry. My career has been dedicated to many of these, equipping me with essential skills and insight into our industry. LTN is a company I have held in high regard for a long time. Its technology solutions, foresight, and contribution to our industry have been outstanding, and they were already anticipating where the industry was heading.

“As a customer of LTN, one of my largest broadcast projects wouldn’t have gotten off the ground if it wasn’t for LTN’s deep understanding of our industry and dedication to partnership.  LTN creates truly transformative solutions. Their entrepreneurial spirit and the power of its network made me a believer in the company’s dedication to think big and do things differently. I am excited to join LTN as its new CTO and for the journey ahead.”

An alumnus of Texas Christian University, Wall graduated with a B.S. in radio-television-film (production track).

The post Brad Wall Named LTN CTO appeared first on TV News Check.

The Sinclair/Avid deal was notable in that Sinclair was looking to bring the same approach it was already using in its IT operations to news production, replacing proprietary editing workstations with virtual machines that run on generic computing power. Groups like Hearst Television and the Fox Television Stations have made similar efforts, virtualizing many of their news production systems to run on on-premise COTS hardware.

Vendors say the concept of virtualization in television operations has expanded as broadcasters look to implement it throughout the entire broadcast chain, including master control functions like captioning and loudness monitoring. And broadcasters are also now looking to take virtualization off-premise, either in their own master control hubs and data centers or through public cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Vendors are responding with flexible, software-based products that can be run on on-premise hardware, in a private data center or on public cloud compute.

Alan Young

The move to virtualization should only increase as more broadcasters roll out ATSC 3.0, or NextGen TV, services, says Alan Young, CTO of IP transmission and production services vendor LTN.

“Because that standard is literally all IP, it is possible to virtualize the whole thing,” Young says. “Not only virtualize but do it remotely, you can put it in the cloud. And that brings enormous possibilities.”

Captioning, monitoring and translation vendor Digital Nirvana is seeing broadcasters move away from vendor-specific hardware to a running a virtualized stack on-prem for their monitoring needs, says Digital Nirvana CEO Hiren Hindocha.

“A lot of our customers have moved away from sourcing the hardware from us to just getting a spec from us, saying this is the hardware that we’re looking for, it’s just a commodity hardware that we certify, and then we sell our software to run on that hardware,” Hindocha says.

Hiren Hindocha

Digital Nirvana sells a cloud-based product called Trance for closed captioning, translation and transcription. But its loudness monitoring systems for recording audio for CALM Act compliance rely on on-premise hardware residing at the local station. However, Hindocha says the monitoring of those systems can be centralized in a master control hub, even for 100 to 200 stations.

For its part, supply chain software vendor SDVI saw a big uptick last year in captioning and subtitling work for non-live programming being done in the cloud. One key driver was that SDVI’s large media customers were doing more distribution deals with more platforms, says SDVI Chief Product Officer Simon Eldridge.

“Captioning and subtitling are becoming a step in the media prep phase instead of the distribution phases,” says Eldridge. “With that goes a change from a device that monitors a feed on the way out, to a piece of software that does that function and prepares the media beforehand.”

Simon Eldridge

Systems integrator Diversified has seen an increase in centralized monitoring through several virtualization projects with large station groups it has done in the past two years. The groups moved to a “hub-and-spoke” model, with the goal being to remove as much physical equipment as possible from the local stations or “spokes” and consolidate functions at a master control hub, says Jason Kornweiss, VP and GM of emerging technology and solutions for Diversified.

Virtualized hardware at the hub is now remotely handling many functions and systems previously performed by discreet systems at the local stations. They include closed-captioning insertion; loudness monitoring for CALM Act compliance, which is done by exception; and emergency alerting (though an EAS radio is still required at the station to receive the in-market signals and communicate to the hub to insert the EAS messaging tones and alerts). Some hubs even perform encoding for final distribution to both over-the-air transmitters and MVPDs for small-to-mid market stations.

Jason Kornweiss

“The impetus was we’ve got x number of TV stations built over time with disparate equipment, and pieces of gear within the release path are in different locations and in need of standardization,” Kornweiss says. “Like, where do you put your school closing ticker and where do you put your closed captioning encoder? And it varies by market on its way to the transmitter. So, they’re chasing standardization through virtualization of as many parts of the product as they can.”

Virtualization at its base level is being able to run different operating systems on a single piece of hardware, allowing several different applications to run on a single server. But many broadcasters quickly moved beyond that to an optimization of virtual machines called containers, which are light pieces of software that allow multiple applications to run on a single operating system. The next step beyond containers are microservices, a software architecture that uses containers to build a distributed application. And microservices are how many broadcast functions are now being provisioned in the cloud.

Brick Eksten

Brick Eksten, CEO of broadcast compliance monitoring, reporting and analysis at vendor Qligent, began working on virtualizing broadcast applications back in 2009 at Digital Rapids, the company he founded. He then later pursued virtualization at Imagine Communications, where he served as CTO and worked with large broadcasters like ABC on their virtualization and cloud initiatives. Eksten sees the public cloud as a logical next step in broadcaster’s virtualization journey, based on an analysis of IT spending across various industries that he performed while at Imagine.

Eksten’s underlying math is an extension of the “3:30:300” rule, a formula first developed by commercial real estate company JLL (Jones, Lang, LaSalle) to express the orders of magnitude between a company’s costs on a per-square-foot, per-year basis: $3 for utilities, $30 for rent, and $300 for payroll.

“The idea is that the absolute costs will go up or down based on location and industry, but the relative proportions hold true,” Eksten explains.

An analysis of data center costs for broadcasters can be used to extend that rule to 3:30:300:3,000, based on an estimated cost of $3,000 per square foot, per year to run a private data center, Eksten says. That is almost twice AWS’ estimated costs of $1647 per square foot to run one of its data centers. So, the numbers only really make sense for the big public cloud vendors like AWS and Google Cloud that can leverage their compute across thousands of customers.

Given many broadcasters’ relative utilization of their existing infrastructure, the $3,000 per square foot number is conservative, Eksten adds. He says the actual number for a smaller broadcaster to run its own data center might be closer to $10,000 per square foot.

“The smaller you are, the less likely it is that you’re running your data center as efficiently as you think you are,” Eksten says. “You are not managing it well, meaning you don’t have it staffed 24/7/365, you’re not looking at all this stuff, you don’t have redundancy for your power and cooling, because you just can’t afford it. So, then it’s even more likely that if you’re a small call-letter station that you really should be considering cloud.”

IP transmission vendor Net Insight, which has long provided on-premise contribution hardware used for IP backhauls by major sports broadcasters, is addressing the virtualization trend with several new products. One, called Nimbra Edge, is a cloud-based contribution server that can be configured to do SRT streaming for an internet backhaul one day and then reconfigured to perform high-quality JPEG XS transmission over a 10-gigabit link the next day.

Per Lindgren

“You can spin it up in private servers, data centers, or public cloud,” says Net Insight CTO Per Lindgren. “You can have different instances and have ingest points and output points.”

Diversified is a big believer in public cloud technology, particularly as a way for broadcasters to quickly launch channels. The company been steadily growing its cloud business, including making several new hires with cloud expertise and partnering with some key vendors, and it is working on public cloud projects with a few major media companies. But given recent events that have shown the cloud’s vulnerability, including multiple outages for leading vendor AWS this past December, it has found some customers are reevaluating how quickly they want to jump in. Instead, many are looking at a mix of cloud compute and on-premise hardware in various “N+1” redundant models.

“I think people are rethinking how much cloud they really want to leverage,” Kornweiss says. “It’s certainly alive and well in production. In the media supply chain, there are a lot of provocative use cases to provide mechanisms in the cloud.”

The post Virtualization Expands, Moving Off-Prem appeared first on TV News Check.

Public cloud giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) has recently addressed the second part of the latency challenge by developing new technology to support uncompressed production workflows in the cloud, which it calls the Cloud Digital Interface (CDI). CDI, a nod to the Serial Digital Interface (SDI) used by legacy on-premise broadcast equipment, supports uncompressed video at formats up to 4K UHD at 60 frames per second with a latency as low as 8 milliseconds, or less than one frame. With COVID-19 having already accelerated broadcasters’ adoption of cloud workflows, AWS hopes that CDI will pave the way for much more production on its platform.

After introducing CDI in September, AWS has worked with cloud-based production vendor Grabyo and IP transport specialist LTN Global to develop a proof-of-concept (POC) using the technology for live sports production. The POC, demonstrated to press this week, employed a hybrid architecture of on-premise and cloud workflows to create multiple regionalized feeds of a live sporting event, using operators in three different locations: Kansas City, Mo.; New York; and London.

First, LTN — which in the past two years has broadened its portfolio beyond content contribution and distribution by acquiring remote production firms Niles Media Group and DTAGS — used its IP transport network to backhaul four 1080i/60 camera feeds from a high school football game to its “LTN Create” production operations center in Kansas City, Mo. There, the 15 to 20 megabit per second (Mbps) feeds were decoded and processed with traditional gear to produce a single “clean feed”, including switching, instant replay and audio mixing functions.

That clean feed was then re-encoded and sent by LTN to the AWS cloud and into MediaConnect, the high-quality, low-latency live video transport system from AWS unit AWS Elemental that supports data rates up to 120 Mbps [for the demo, the feeds were sent by LTN at 20 Mbps using H.264 compression].

Once in the AWS cloud, the clean feed was uncompressed and managed with CDI, which allows low-latency network transport between different Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) “instances”—virtual servers used to run an application. In this case, the EC2 instances were running Grabyo Producer switcher software, which replicated the feed twice-over and then added different graphics to create three distinct regionalized feeds.

Those three feeds were then reencoded and sent back via MediaConnect to the LTN network for final distribution, which could be to a TV station, cable operator or digital platform. The three customized feeds were shown on a multiviewer to demonstrate both the different graphic treatments and the synchronization of the frames.

Gareth Capon

“This is showing you how you can create multiple outputs for a single event with a very simple setup, and run by a single person, or people running different parts of the production from different locations,” said Grabyo CEO Gareth Capon.

While the production workflow demonstrated was relatively simple — inserting different graphics in the same video — Capon said Grabyo’s software could do far more with uncompressed video, including inserting different audio or even switching between live camera feeds in the cloud. He said the AWS/LTN/Grabyo demo was more about showing the potential of CDI for live production. He added that without CDI just replicating feeds in the cloud was difficult, as generating multiple compressed outputs from the Grabyo switcher quickly ate up computing power.

“This was a genuine challenge of some of our cloud productions in the last 12 months,” said Capon. “As people wanted to scale them, we were having to quite heavily compress some of the outputs between the instances of our Producer vision mixer in the cloud.”

AWS Elemental Senior Product Manager David Griggs agreed, and said the old way of working in a single EC2 instance in the compressed domain would eventually run into technical limits.

David Griggs

“At some point you’re not going to be able to replicate that stream anymore, because you hit a resource constraint of some description, whether that’s CPU, memory, or I/O bandwidth,” Griggs said. “What CDI allows you to do is to scale and spread that processing across multiple instances. So in this case each of these replicated feeds is being processed on its own instance, and therefore, ultimately the scalability of the deployment is far less constrained.”

That kind of flexibility should allow broadcast customers to grow and shrink their cloud-based production infrastructure based on the unique requirements of each event, Griggs said. And his hope is that CDI will eventually allow a true production control room (PCR) to be built in the cloud with different tools from multiple vendors.

“It’s the interface, it’s the SDI in the cloud, it’s that interoprability tool that allows a data plane of multiple solutions to communicate,” Griggs said. “If we don’t have that, we wind up building very cool processing islands that can’t talk to each other, and so we’ve missed. So we’re really serious about CDI becoming not just a fast and reliable connectivity product, but also a product that brings that level of interoperabilty.”

He said that AWS is currently reaching out to various broadcast vendors in the production, master control and playout environments about the virtues of launching their products in the cloud using CDI, with the near-term goal of creating an extended POC of the technology for live production.

Rick Young

For its part, LTN thinks the new capabilities available with CDI could help drive more growth for its “LTN Flex” at-home production business, which has already gained significant traction with lower-tier professional sports, smaller college sports conferences and niche sports like surfing. LTN SVP of Global Products Rick Young noted that the college market today has expanded well beyond just football and basketball.

“It’s all 20 sports the university does,” Young said.

LTN has already been using its centralized production system to create differentiated home and away feeds for a Major League Soccer team, Young said, and similar functionality could also be accomplished in the cloud using an application like Grabyo’s. He expects further growth in live content, which he calls a “differentiator” and “churn killer” for programmers and platforms competing against SVOD services, as the cloud makes production more affordable.

Young added: “It’s all possible now with technology like this, and workflows that are efficient like this.”

Amazon Web Services is developing new technology — the Cloud Digital Interface — to support uncompressed production workflows in the cloud.
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