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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more coverage of NewsTECHForum 2023 here.

Watch this session and all the NewsTECHForum 2023 videos here.

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

A panel of top streaming executives at major station groups will address these and other crucial questions in a session, Reassessing the Streaming News Content Strategy, at TVNewsCheck’s NewsTECHForum conference on Dec. 12 at the New York Hilton. They’ll discuss how data and technology are facilitating decision making and how deep audiences’ appetites for experimentation run when watching news content on streaming.

Speakers are Mike Braun, SVP, digital media, Gray Television; Greg Morrow, GM of ViewNexa, Bitcentral; Sahand Sepehrnia, SVP, streaming, CBS News & Stations; Rick Young, SVP, head of global products, LTN; and Jeff Zellmer, SVP digital operations, Fox Television Stations. Michael Depp, chief content officer, NewsCheckMedia and editor, TVNewsCheck, will moderate the discussion.

“The sands of news content on streaming are shifting extremely quickly, and what’s behind that is years of data now available since news organizations first launched their streaming channels,” Depp said. “This panel will dive into the data and the insights it has illuminated on consumer behavior when watching streaming news content, including on emerging FAST channels.

“We couldn’t have a deeper bench of experts to crack open this subject,” he said, “and the stakes couldn’t be higher in terms of acquiring the next generation of viewers to keep local news operations alive and thriving.”

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
• Building the Architecture of More Collaborative Content Creation
• Harvesting the Archive for New Content and Opportunities
• Adapting to a Culture of Continuous Crisis
• Agility in News Production
• Chasing AI: Threatening or Enhancing the News?

Register here.

The post NewsTECHForum: Reassessing The Streaming News Content Strategy appeared first on TV News Check.

After a long pandemic absence and a couple of costly false starts, RAI Amsterdam Convention Center buzzed once more with broadcasters and vendors who weren’t just eager to plunge back into trade; many were outright emotional about it.

Hugs and handshakes were unselfconsciously returned in abundance among thousands of Zoom- and Teams-fatigued attendees grateful to be pulled out of the virtual world and into the balmy, late summer Dutch weather. After three years, they were back, dodging the scrums of bicyclists scudding past the RAI’s “beach” and wending through its warren of buildings.

But the 37,000 visitors and 1,000 exhibitors here returned to a changed industry landscape, and reminders of that dotted every conversation. Many of the broadcasters were much further along their transitions to IP- and cloud-based infrastructures than they’d planned to be before the pandemic. They came armed with questions and concerns about costs, efficiencies and security with a new urgency as they debated which parts of their workflows might be safely virtualizable.

Others were eager to discuss FAST channels and the speediest ways to get up and running on them. And still more wanted to get their hands on the kinds of technology that eludes virtualization — the cameras, robotic systems, tripods and other gear for which no Zoom demonstration can ever be an adequate substitute.

This being Europe, questions about the environmental impact of all this technology were more frequently raised than one might see at any given U.S. convocation.

Amid the general buoyancy, though, there was pandemic fallout that couldn’t be avoided. Supply chain problems have cut deeply into vendors’ ability to deliver, and the workforce has tilted heavily to favor the engineers and other skilled employees on whose expertise broadcasting relies. There, too, demand widely outstrips supply, try as the industry might to mitigate it.

Human Connection

It was hard for attendees to suppress their sheer joy and relief at being together in person once again, with vendors in particular finding numerous upshots in the opportunity.

“You can’t replace the environment you get in a trade show,” said Sebastien Verlaine, head of marketing and communications for EVS, which was back with a slightly smaller booth than previous years but one that had been outfitted with a sports bar to maximize a sense of conviviality.

For Matthieu Zarouk, director of product marketing at Dalet, the company’s many remote demonstrations and events were also no full substitute for meeting in person. “It’s still really important to build a connection,” Zarouk said. “It’s not really to see the products but having that face-to-face human connection.”

Haivision’s Mark Harchler, product marketing director, said he was surprised at how eager potential customers at the show were to “get back into action,” many of them hunting the show floor with specific products in mind. “It’s not just tire kicking,” he said.

Many vendors noticed that broadcasters had sent smaller contingencies to the show, but those there were often more driven than in pre-pandemic times.

“People come now with an intent and focus,” said Glodina Connan-Lostanlen, chief sales and marketing officer for Imagine. “The traffic is focused. There is something driving the reason to be here.”

Peter Hatlan, FOR-A’s U.K. GM, said, “You get a much better feel for how people are reacting to what you’re telling them because you can read their body language.”

The sentiment was echoed by Jim O’Brien, president of Aveco, who said that reading goes both ways between vendor and client. “The human element of knowing individuals involved is incredibly important,” he said. “Are you trustworthy? You say you have something, now show me.”

For some companies, IBC was also a chance to connect in person for the first time with employees who had been brought on during the pandemic. “Long-term relationships are very tough to start and build when we were only doing Zoom and Teams, said Rob Waters, global director, sales for Dejero. “The show is the only place we see these guys face to face.”

And for at least one company, IBC was a chance to go large. In a time when many vendors had reduced their booth size, Blackmagic Design brought its biggest booth ever to the show along with 77 people from across the globe to populate it, according to Bob Caniglia, director of sales operations, Americas.

Part of that was to show off the number of products it had released since the pandemic for the first time, he said, along with getting feedback from customers on what they could finally see and touch for the first time.

“The opportunity you get at a show is people-driven,” Caniglia said. “We’ll demo a product on

Day One, but clients will come back a day or two later having thought about it with questions or concerns. The feedback loop is healthy.”

The Cloud, IP And Hybridity

If one narrative pervaded the show this year, it was pandemic’s powerful shove on broadcasters’ tentative transition to IP- and cloud-based infrastructures.

Andreas Hillmer, CMO of Lawo, estimates the pandemic accelerated those transitions by at least three years. Lawo’s remit at the show was to convince clients that its own IP infrastructure solution was usable, deployable and secure, not to mention, in Hillmer’s view, inevitable.

“It’s not a question anymore of the if and the when,” he said. “It’s just the how.”

Julian Fernandez-Campon, CTO of Tedial, said much of his own purpose at the show was to help ease anxieties around the cloud transition by easing broadcasters over in increments via microservices, one of the show’s biggest buzzwords this year.

Fernandez-Campon said he’s pressing for a “sensible” track to the transition by being “modular” in the approach to using some cloud services, trying some out and then swapping them for others if broadcasters aren’t happy with the performance. “It’s not a big bang to change everything,” he said.

EVS’s Verlaine said he’s emphasizing “a balanced approach for how to use the cloud where you can scale up and down production capacity to meet specific needs.

“We’re seeing customers want more flexibility,” he said. “The cloud can be an answer, but it’s not the only truth for everyone.”

“Everybody is on a completely different trajectory and timeline,” said Mediakind’s Carl Furgusson, head of portfolio development. “There are different stages of understanding and different drivers as to what might motivate people.”

One of the main drivers is a concern about cost, and Furgusson said a comparative cost analysis needs to take the whole picture into view. Broadcasters aren’t always comparing cloud costs “apple for apple,” he said, and need to consider all of the variables to potential adoption including negotiating better pricing by doing two- and three-year deals and the longer-term cost savings on physical infrastructure enabled by migrating services to the cloud.

“The pandemic resulted in our customers starting to broaden their usage of cloud, remote and distributed systems,” said Ken Haren, director of marketing for Zixi. “Now the question is, Do I go all in?”

Those customers have voiced concerns about never-declining cloud costs, he said, but new commercial models like dynamic rights arrangements are helping to ease those anxieties. “I certainly see customers looking for efficiencies,” he said.

Craig Wilson, product evangelist for Avid, echoed many vendors when he said that these questions won’t be resolved in broadcasters’ minds anytime soon. “In the industry there’s still a conversation going on of total cost of ownership, not just the cloud but what they’re doing today,” he said. “People will be talking about the same thing six to 12 months down the line, just deeper along in the conversation.”

FAST Talk

Streaming and the lucrative potential of FAST channels was another big topic at IBC, and Srini KA, co-founder of Amagi, was there to capitalize on it.

“FAST has been one of the biggest drivers of growth for us,” KA said, observing the industry has come full circle from a “FAB” (free ad-supported broadcasting) model to the streaming version of FAST.

“What people are reasoning now is life is going to be omnistreaming,” he said. “It’s not just going to be on your app.”

He said when viewers cut the cord, the two biggest things they lose are news and sports, and TV station groups have begun to understand that.

People are also starting to understand that FAST channels facilitate broadcast’s lean-back behaviors. “Sometimes FAST is about don’t make me think. Make me a vegetable,” KA said, noting it can also be “the TikTok for CTV” if done right.

LTN Global was also sharing its FAST channel solutions with customers, and Rick Young, SVP of global products, said companies he’d spoken with were primarily looking to drive scale, putting more content on more streaming platforms.

Young cautioned, “It’s no longer enough to put regurgitated news content on FAST platforms,” and conversations were “shifting toward how to create original streaming content efficiently there.”

Tactile Necessities

Some technology needs hands-on demonstrations more than others, as Michael Cuomo, VP at camera robotics company Telemetrics, knows all too well.

“IBC is so important to us because it’s like buying a car. You want to come out and play with the equipment. You want to test drive it in person,” Cuomo said.

“You need to feel it. It’s so physical,” agreed James Eddershaw, managing director of Shotoku UK, a camera support company focused on “high value, low volume” products that need to be seen in person. Fortunately, he said, many customers returned with their big capital expenditure projects intact “because this stuff isn’t cheap.”

“It’s tactile,” added Steve Turner, senior product manager for camera support company Videndum. “The products have to be felt, tried.” Fortunately, he said, the booth had been
“much busier than some of us expected.”

Environmental Concerns

A current of energy consumption consciousness rode through IBC reflective of its European setting and a looming energy crisis facing the continent.

German vendor Rohde & Schwartz was promoting its TH1 liquid-cooled transmitter with a value proposition framed around the idea of sustainability. Josef Muller, a technical sales manager for the company, said his clients were expressing growing concerns about energy costs as they make purchasing decisions.

“In Europe, there are customers pledging to go zero carbon in the next two to three years at any cost,” said Vizrt’s Ulricht Voight, VP of product management.

Ulrika Cederskog Sundling, head of growth at Varnish Software, touted the company’s founding membership in a “Greening of Streaming” coalition as a selling point to customers.

“There’s a big cost of streaming in general because it takes up so much energy,” she said. “We have a great ambition for sustainability.”

Supply Chain Woes

A decidedly unsustainable situation echoed frequently across the show, however, was the unremitting pressure vendors were feeling on their supply chains.

“We’ve got all of these orders, and we’re suffering to deliver them,” said Laurent Roul, VP of marketing for Enensys. He said products that normally see four to eight weeks’ delivery time have now been pushed past 12 weeks.

The company is still waiting on some components it ordered last April, with motherboard components being the most elusive and expensive. Some, Roul, said, have gone up in price from 10 cents to 10 euros.

“From small components to bigger ones, everything is a pain in the ass,” he said.

“The hangover from COVID is the semiconductor situation,” said Bruce Swail, CEO of GatesAir. “It’s horrendous. Lead times that are normally eight to 12 weeks are 52 to 72 weeks. It’s making your planning horizon over a year really difficult and kills your ability for upstrike action.”

The supply shortages have forced Harmonic to source more in advance, taking more direct control of the supply chain out of Indonesia to limit their risk. “There is a cost attached to that but given the risk of not being able to ship everything, the choice is an easy one,” said Stephane Cloirec, VP of appliance product management.

Telemetrics’ Cuomo spoke for many vendors in noting that the company has taken to modifying some of its products to work around the shortages. “It’s been something we wanted to do anyway. It just came a little sooner than we were hoping it would,” he said.

Labor Friction

It isn’t just the supply chain of components that have tied one hand behind vendors’ backs — it’s the escalated competition for labor, too.

“Right now, it’s very much an employees’ market,” GatesAir’s Swail said.

Blackbird CEO Ian McDonough has been in an aggressive hiring mode through the pandemic, bringing in a new VP of engineering, chief product officer and developers along the way. Still, he concedes, “hiring engineers that want to be anything less than 100% remote is quite a challenge.”

That, in turn, has only exacerbated his own challenge of coalescing the culture of a rapidly growing company over solely remote means.

David Dowling, chief revenue officer for graphics and virtual production company Pixotope, said the scarcity of talent has led to a choke point.

“If there isn’t talent to create in [graphics engine] Unreal and animate and produce, then we’re going to run out of customers,” Dowling said.

But Pixotope is getting proactive about the problem, he said, launching a Pixotope Education Program aimed at students who might otherwise gravitate to the popular gaming industry.

The program has only just launched so it’s far too early to measure success, but it was clear that broadcast’s technology side will need to do more to staff up against a series of transitions that are fundamentally changing its architecture and workflows.

In the meantime, however, people at IBC were simply grateful that they had made it through to the other side of a life- and industry-changing event, shoulder to shoulder once more and ready to face the steep wall of challenges in front of them.

The post At IBC, Returning To A New Normal 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.

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Working closely with divisional product management teams, he will set the company’s strategic direction and cultivate key partnerships that enable the company to offer unique services within the media ecosystem.

“Rick has a lengthy record of leadership in organizations dedicated to content production and delivery technology,” said Malik Khan, co-founder and executive chairman of LTN Global. “We value his deep industry knowledge, as well as his thoughtful and creative approach to strategy and building unique, growth-oriented solutions. His dedication and leadership will be vital as LTN continues to extend its technology portfolio and end-to-end service offerings for content creation, distribution, and monetization.”

Young joined LTN in 2018 as vice president of global business development, having previously served in similar senior executive roles at Encompass Digital Media. He earlier was vice president and general manager at Bitcentral, where he oversaw sales, marketing, product strategy, and business development; vice president, products and services, at Clearleap; vice president of product management at Pathfire; and manager of production services at Virage.

Early in Young’s career, his experience working for major news organizations included the role of digital operation manager at ABC News, and he was an original team member of the newsroom production technology team at the Associated Press.

Young earned his bachelor’s degree in communications/broadcasting from Penn State University.

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