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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more coverage of NewsTECHForum 2023 here.

Watch this session and all the NewsTECHForum 2023 videos here.

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

These leaders will also share the technologies that are surfacing to best enable these projects, facilitate cross-group communication and make promising local content visible to all.

Speakers are Meredith McGinn, EVP, diginets & original production, NBCUniversal Local; Kate O’Brian, president, Scripps News, E.W. Scripps Co.; Kengo Tsutsumi, partnerships editor, ProPublica; Lee Zurik, VP of investigations, Gray Television; and Stephane Guez, co-founder & principal, Dalet. Michael Depp, chief content officer, NewsCheckMedia and editor, TVNewsCheck, will moderate the discussion.

“Collaborations — both across and between news organizations — have been a major focus of the industry this year, and the groups leaning into them have learned a lot about how to build the best possible architecture to see them thrive,” Depp said. “This panel will draw from an enormous amount of accumulated knowledge from organizations who’ve realized that this may be the only way to stay viable with news consumers looking forward.”

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

Featured sessions are:

• Keynote: Democracy, Technology, TV Journalism and the 2024 Election
• Reassessing the Streaming News Content Strategy
• 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: Building The Architecture Of More Collaborative Content Creation appeared first on TV News Check.

The Dalet upgrade program, it says, “will greatly benefit media organizations that struggle with outdated and siloed products by eliminating the drag of technical debt and streamlining workflows from ingest to distribution with Dalet Flex. The unique, value-added Dalet offering addresses all media workflow use cases on a single, state-of-the-art technology platform supported by 360°professional services, including cloud operations and security. All on a single subscription with worldwide 24/7 coverage.”

Dalet upgrade program highlights include:

• Expedited migration and implementation services to help customers quickly move data and workflows.
• Financial incentives for transitioning from legacy solutions to Dalet Flex, in addition to the resulting operational cost savings.
• Free Dalet Learning Hub training access for one year to assist users with change management and accelerate adoption.
• Complimentary media workflow consultation that provides a detailed assessment of a company’s media workflow strengths and bottlenecks as well as a blueprint for a successful transition.

Following customer feedback, Dalet has identified three key legacy workflows that M&E companies can significantly improve upon with Dalet Flex:

• Archive Management
• Production Asset Management
• Integrated Editing

With the Dalet competitive upgrade program, customers can migrate away from outdated, high-maintenance equipment and gain significant efficiencies on a modern, cloud-native platform that improves wider operations with enhanced collaboration, security and business intelligence.

For more information, click here.

The post Dalet Introduces Upgrade Program To Cloud Platform appeared first on TV News Check.

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.”

The post Efficiency Is IBC’s 2023 Mantra appeared first on TV News Check.

The station group, which comprises 31 Telemundo stations, 12 NBC stations, five NBC Regional Sports Networks and two multicast networks (Cozi TV and TeleXitos), has been working to overhaul its news workflows for several years. It first experimented with a private cloud model for news production back in 2019 at Telemundo station KBLR Las Vegas by using a high-speed network to remotely control ST 2110 hardware located in a Dallas data center.

While that effort was successful, the need for more remote workflows due to the COVID-19 pandemic led NBCUniversal Local to pivot away from the private cloud and accelerate its evaluation of public cloud technology.

Its first big move was at KASA Albuquerque, N.M., a newly acquired Telemundo station that had to quickly start up local news production and did it by launching an end-to-end cloud workflow last year. Then in June, KTDO began producing live news in the cloud from a brand-new 12,000-square foot facility in El Paso.

Like KASA, KTDO is operating a production control room (PCR) in the cloud based on Vizrt’s Viz Vectar live production switcher, which it uses to switch both studio sources and live feeds from the field. HD-SDI studio sources are converted to SRT and sent to the cloud via Cisco IP switches, while LiveU and Dejero bonded feeds are received by a software “appliance” in the cloud using SRT (Secure Reliable Transport) or RTMP (Real-Time Messaging Protocol). However, a few latency-sensitive applications that are tightly tied to the studio, such as the weather presentation, still use on-premise hardware.

A Fresh Start

Jaime Martinez

Moving to a new building was the impetus for KTDO to fully adopt IP and cloud-based technologies, says NBCUniversal Local’s Jaime Martinez, who is director of technology for both KTDO and KASA . Planning for the El Paso project began back in September 2021, which is when Martinez joined NBCUniversal Local from Sinclair, where he had worked for Tennis Channel as well as several stations. While Martinez had experience with REMI workflows at Tennis Channel, moving into cloud-based production was a new venture for him as well as KTDO.

“Everything just fell at the right time, and for the right reasons,” says Martinez.

After a year of planning, integration of the new building started in January 2023. Martinez says it was “a soft integration” due to equipment backorders resulting from the pandemic as well as some construction delays, and KTDO extended the lease in its old building several times. The station operated across both facilities through May before switching over fully in June, with its 4 p.m. newscast on June 21 being the first live newscast from the cloud.

KTDO’s new facility is spacious compared to its old home, with an open-concept newsroom and a large control room that looks traditional despite being used mainly to drive software “instances” in the cloud. There is an immersive 360-degree news set which includes the anchor desk, a weather center surrounded by large LED monitors and a dedicated sports desk area that includes more LED monitors.

“It’s night and day,” Martinez says. “You’re talking about something that was legacy equipment, and a very small studio — that has definitely expanded. Now the talent can walk in front of full screen monitors, do the weather presentation, but also walk over to the keywall.”

While the set is bigger, on-premise hardware is minimal, particularly since KTDO’s playout runs out of “Dry Creek,” NBCU’s master control hub at Comcast Media Center in Colorado (the Harmonic VOS360 system is used to encode its transport streams). There are eight racks in the station’s equipment room, but the hardware fits into only four fully populated racks. That includes Cisco IP switches, a WSI weather system and a partial on-premise HD-SDI router. That router supports the weather system and also populates the monitors in the studio.

“So we have that flexibility,” Martinez says. “We want to make sure we have a safety net, because this was one of the first fully-cloud systems. The next [NBCU Local] build, I’m sure it’s going to be with no router.”

APC Integration

KTDO’s cloud production system supports full MOS integration, including the Ross OverDrive production automation system running with Furio camera robotics and the SmartShell control system.

Other key technology includes Sony box-type studio cameras, Cineo lighting, Ross Video XPression graphics, Harrison’s Mixbus VBM cloud-based audio mixer, Dalet’s Galaxy newsroom system and Adobe Premiere editing for high-end packages.

The KTDO weather desk

The station also benefits from an IPTV system that interconnects all of the NBC and Telemundo stations, allowing them to see each other’s feeds as well as the live camera at 30 Rock in New York. Martinez says that system helps foster the sharing of content across the group.

“We share content regionally and also nationally, depending on the story,” he says. “Especially since we are a border town. We have regional news in the morning that comes out of Dallas, and they do pick up a lot of our stories from here.”

KTDO is a lean operation, with 50 total employees including sales, production and news personnel. Like many other NBCU stations, it is a regular OverDrive user. To run a newscast, the station relies on a producer and two APC operators, the “pilot” and “copilot,” who sit in the control room.

The cloud integration with Ross OverDrive was relatively straightforward, Martinez says, as an automated production control (APC) operator can preset the camera shots in the system. KTDO has successfully tested running a newscast with the APC operators in different locations, with the pilot working from his home and the co-pilot at the station in case of a problem.

“We have done some testing where we run it from the APC’s house, and they are able to do everything there that they’re able to do here onsite,” Martinez says.

Overcoming Latency Challenges

Moving to cloud-based production definitely requires a change in mindset, as operators need to become comfortable dealing with virtual panels instead of physical controls.

“You’re shifting the mentality from manual to in the cloud,” says Martinez. “So, for example, [before] you have your audio board right in front of you where you can make the changes physically. In this case, you’ve got to log onto the cloud and make the changes virtually. The same thing with any kind of troubleshooting issues. Right now, you go back and you reset a cloud-up or a cloud-down instance. Where before you would have to go patch around it, or go trace a cable, or you go look at the drawings, do a route.”

Not surprisingly, dealing with latency was the biggest challenge for KTDO in moving from on-premise switching of its newscast to switching in the cloud. The major obstacle is for the talent in viewing their return monitors.

“That two-second delay in TV is a long time,” Martinez says. “So they’ve got to take on the cue, instead of waiting to see themselves on the preview monitor. That took some training, but we’re getting pretty good at it now. So that was one obstacle that we’ve overcome.”

Dealing with live feeds delivered through the cloud by LiveU or Dejero bonded systems via RTMP or SRT signals adds an additional delay, so the station cues talent five seconds in advance before they hit live.

One place where the latency of the cloud is still problematic is in weather presentation, specifically in providing a return feed for meteorologists doing weather segments in front of a green screen. When chroma keying for a meteorologist, the round trip of processing it in the cloud and then bringing a return feed back for the talent is still too long today. That’s why KTDO still handles that function on-premise.

Given the high-resolution graphics involved, being able to support weather presentation fully from the cloud is “still a ways away,” Martinez says. But the technology is improving quickly enough that he thinks in another year it might go into the testing phase.

Overall, Martinez thinks the biggest benefit of cloud production is in its flexibility, particularly in a difficult labor market where TV stations are having a hard time hiring personnel like APC operators.

“Anybody that has connectivity can run the system,” he says. “So the flexibility is definitely the powerful piece of it. And I can see it being a great benefit for sports, because you get your best technical director on the seat in one location, [who] can be jumping around to different sports at different venues.”

The post Riding The Cloud At KTDO appeared first on TV News Check.

“Complementing the high-density Dalet Brio on-premises ingest and playout platform, the cloud-native Dalet InStream leverages the agility and performance of the cloud in a pay-per-use model, bringing greater efficiency, flexibility, and cost savings to capturing news, sports, and other key live events,” the release said. “Dalet InStream seamlessly integrates across the Dalet ecosystem – Dalet Flex, Dalet Pyramid, and Dalet Galaxy five – enabling customers to schedule, record, access, edit, and deliver content from anywhere, faster than ever. The flexible end-to-end cloud workflows provide customers with new opportunities to expand their programming and significantly reduce total cost of ownership (TCO).”

“The amount of content our news and sports customers need to capture and manage from live events is growing exponentially, overwhelming their existing on-premises infrastructure. These companies are looking for a cost-effective solution that enables them to ingest content from an ever-growing number of live sources while reducing reliance on on-premises resources that typically sit idle for hours on end. Dalet flips this challenge into an opportunity, allowing them to scale their ingest capabilities as needed to thrive in an IP-first world,” said Lincoln Spiteri, CTO of Dalet. “Recording simultaneous IP streams, particularly for major live events such as the Olympics and national elections, has typically been complex and expensive. Fully integrated within Dalet’s cloud-native ecosystem, including the web-based editor Dalet Cut, Dalet InStream opens new doors for media organizations to accelerate their content time-to-market and expand their programming.”

With the introduction of Dalet InStream, any ingest scenario required by Dalet customers is now fully supported: from IP streams in the cloud to on-premises SDI & IP feeds, standard file upload and camera card ingest, said the company. Dalet InStream is also a major milestone for the Dalet cloud-native product roadmap, the company added, as it completes Dalet’s end-to-end ingest-to-distribution cloud offering, providing customers the flexibility and computing power of the cloud on an architecture and business model that future proofs their operations.

Dalet InStream can be deployed within a day. No additional hardware investment or resources required. With a flexible subscription and pay-per-use model, customers can significantly reduce ingest costs with potential savings between 50 and 80 percent.

Some key capabilities of Dalet InStream, a solution introducing agility and efficiency to ingest operations, from the company press release include:

• Scale ingest capabilities dynamically based on immediate needs, removing barriers for expanded opportunities.
• Access ingest content from anywhere and enable faster workflows with growing file support, allowing you to begin editing immediately.
• Reduce total cost of ownership while maintaining broadcast-quality capture and formats (high resolution and proxy generation).
• Centralize operations with a user-friendly interface that enables users to manage both IP and on-premises SDI ingest, when combined with Dalet Brio.
• Support a wide range of broadcast feed formats including SRT, NDI or RTMP from web sources, Zoom and backpack solutions to ingest live content from the field.
• Optimize and streamline operations for news organizations through centralized recordings, which are available to users across multiple sites. This significantly eliminates the need for duplicate human and staff efforts and technical resources, introducing considerable TCO savings.

In conjunction with Dalet InStream, customers can leverage tools such as the web-based media editor Dalet Cut for live editing, fast-tracking assembly of content for highlights, social sharing, or programs, as well as distribution – all in the cloud. The underlying cloud-native architecture of Dalet InStream provides the firepower required to manage the recording of the world’s most complex events while future-proofing the platform for future transformation. As a SaaS offering, Dalet InStream users always leverage its latest capabilities, thanks to recurrent updates and no maintenance requirements.

Available today, Dalet InStream will make its official debut at IBC2023, held in Amsterdam from September 15 through 18, on stand 7.B45 in hall 7. Attendees can book a private demo to experience Dalet InStream in action at: https://www.dalet.com/events/ibc-2023

The post IBC: Dalet Announces ‘InStream’ Product For Live Streams At Scale In The Cloud, Available Today appeared first on TV News Check.

Ren Middleton, Dalet VP Sales, Asia Pacific, said: “In today’s changing environment, where the needs of media organizations are in constant evolution, collaborating with partners such as Telstra Broadcast Services is a key enabler to success. Our customers tell us that agility is key to their business, so onboarding the right technology quickly enables them to accelerate their time to market. Partnering with TBS will enable us to deliver solutions to our joint customers with the velocity and efficiency they expect.”

Dalet’s media workflow solutions, which are available as a subscription, let customers monetize archival content, automate supply chains and packaging, compliance editorial and delivery. Dalet said its Flexs “award-winning MAM and orchestration engine eliminate siloed productions that hinder collaboration and automate intelligent workflows that solve operational challenges, enabling media companies to achieve their business goals.”

With a team of media industry professionals and 24/7 operations support, Telstra Broadcast Services offers project delivery, high-performance media networks, cloud migration and managed services.

Dalet and TBS have a longstanding relationship with enterprise projects that have transformed sports, OTT and broadcast organizations including the Australian Football League.

“We are thrilled to enter into this strategic partnership with Dalet, combining their best-in-market media workflow solutions with Telstra Broadcast Services’ state-of-the-art infrastructure and operations teams,” said Karen Clark, head of APAC at Telstra Broadcast Services. “This collaboration will accelerate the digital transformation of media workflows in the Asia Pacific region, offering our customers premium cloud-first production platforms and services. By leveraging Dalet Flex and our managed services, we aim to deliver solutions that enable our joint customers to achieve their business goals with greater velocity and efficiency.”

The post Dalet And Telstra Broadcast Services Set Strategic Partnership appeared first on TV News Check.

The latest long-term support (LTS) release brings the following capabilities that provide an enhanced user experience and accelerate content movement, editing and delivery across viewer platforms.

• New fast-paced editing workflows with Dalet Cut, the award-winning, multimedia and multiformat web-based editor. Users can work on content preparation and cutdowns, social media highlights and compliance editing workflows, all fully integrated within the Dalet Flex ecosystem.
• Enhanced user interface for FlexMOVE that enables users to effortlessly upload media and metadata, for individual files or in bulk. A new integration with IBM Aspera Connect data transfer solution is also included within the application to further speed up your workflows.
• Simplified camera card ingest, enabling deeper control over assets and productions, thanks to shared users and permissions between Dalet AmberFin Kiosk and Dalet Flex.

According to the company, Dalet Flex “provides full flexibility to configure workflows in the cloud, on-premises, or a hybrid of both. Its expanded ecosystem brings much needed efficiencies to creative media operations dealing with multiple pipelines of content for production, packaging, repackaging, distribution and archive on a cloud-native workflow platform that is future-proof. As market demands evolve, the platform provides increased extensibility thanks to its cloud-native, microservices-based architecture.”

Mathieu Zarouk, Dalet VP product management, said: “Dalet Flex is designed from the ground up to supercharge production and distribution workflows from ingest to delivery. The comprehensive Dalet Flex ecosystem seamlessly interconnects third-party business and production systems, enabling customers to manage complex workflows from sales to library management to packaging and distribution faster and in a much more user-friendly way. Key innovations like the cloud-native media editor Dalet Cut enable our users to evolve their content preparation capabilities and leverage the cloud to collaborate anywhere”.

Dalet Cut — Announced at NAB 2023, Dalet Cut is a web-based editor that seamlessly integrates with the Dalet Flex platform. It’s a lightning-fast, user-friendly multimedia editing tool with native access to your full media library enabling users of all video editing skill levels to quickly edit and publish content from anywhere. Dalet Cut is ideal for workflows that require fast media assembly including content preparation, cutdowns, game highlights and recaps, as well as compliance editing. Feature highlights include:

• Edit from a browser with no additional software or hardware for users to install
• Access your full media library and content archive directly from your editing tool whether it’s in the cloud or on-premises
• Create multiple versions with different aspect ratios, ideal for today’s digital media landscape
• End-to-end workflows where files can stay in the cloud from start to finish

Dalet Flex’s underlying Media Asset Management and Orchestration engine keeps track of in-progress content workflows, eliminating the complexity of managing large pools of assets across multiple locations.

The latest Dalet Flex release includes additional enhancements that bring added flexibility and control to users, including a refreshed user interface for Dalet FlexMOVE. With a more intuitive user experience, it is now quicker and easier to load content to the platform. Additional integration with IBM Aspera Connect allows customers to leverage their existing Aspera account for accelerated file uploads within the Dalet Flex ecosystem, saving time and resources.

In addition, tighter integration with Dalet AmberFin Kiosk ingest management tool, through shared users and metadata, enables easy and efficient import of camera cards into the platform. With this enhanced functionality including optional per-user quotas, customers gain higher control over their projects, while seamlessly leveraging the power of Dalet AmberFin for their production and distribution workflows.

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To successfully complete the AWS FTR, AWS Partners must adopt specific best practices around security, reliability and operational excellence as defined by the AWS Well-Architected Framework. Dalet’s focus on security and long-standing ISO/IEC 27001 certification, combined with a mature global cloud operations team that’s recognized for its best practices, can keep customers’ data secure and operations online when migrating to the cloud.

As members of the AWS ISV Accelerate Program, a co-sell program for AWS Partners that provides software solutions running on, or integrating with, AWS, Dalet meets AWS best practices and standards that are designed to produce better customer outcomes.

“The attractiveness of a cloud-native platform like Dalet Flex is the scalability and elasticity achieved running on AWS. As your workload shifts and evolves, you can right-size your operations on the fly,” says Lincoln Spiteri, CTO, Dalet. “With our completion of the AWS Foundational Technical Review and being part of the AWS ISV Accelerate Program, our customers can be confident that Dalet adheres to the AWS Well-Architected Framework, providing a seamless customer cloud experience, wherever they are in their journey.”

Dalet Flex, the company say, “offers customers outstanding elasticity and scalability to cover a wide range of workflows including”:

Modern Archive Management and Monetization — Cost-effectively and quickly migrate aging archives into a modern content library for collaborative use and unlimited monetization opportunities.

Powerful Media Supply Chain and Distribution — Orchestrate, automate, scale and analyze content packaging and global distribution.

Streamlined Production Asset Management — Integrate and orchestrate production and media asset management to eliminate production silos and processing friction that bogs down collaboration.

The post Dalet Completes AWS Foundational Technical Review For Dalet Flex And Joins AWS ISV Accelerate Program appeared first on TV News Check.

Available today for Dalet Pyramid news customers and in summer 2023 for Dalet Flex media workflow customers, Dalet says Dalet Cut “powers live web-based editing from anywhere with native access to all assets including clips, sequences, projects and graphics, even on limited bandwidth. The intuitive user experience enables content producers and storytellers to collaborate with unparalleled speed and efficiency, delivering better audience experiences across linear and non-linear channels. In a few clicks, content targeted for linear channels can be repackaged for social and OTT platforms, optimizing resources and saving time.”

Robin Kirchhoffer, Dalet CMO, said: “Dalet Cut is a game-changing web-based editor. There is no other solution on the market that provides such speed, mobility and format agility. The native integration of the editing process into the wider media production and storytelling workflow brings tremendous value through collaboration. In news production specifically, Dalet Cut seamlessly blends field and newsroom editing workflows — offering exactly the same user experience to both. Designed for all skill sets, Dalet Cut simplifies editing and production workflows so that there is no training required for new users.”

• Dalet Cut benefits for News Workflows include:
• Break the news first — Dalet Cut for Pyramid (originally Pyramid Cut) supports growing files, closed captions and edit-in-place both on-premises and in the cloud. Packaging and distribution of eye-catching stories is quick and easy in a single browser tab.
• Create multimedia news stories from anywhere — Cloud-native, browser-based proxy editing coupled with intuitive tools for story creation eliminates the need for VPN, media movement, local rendering or lengthy training. Journalists, producers, editors and freelancers can quickly come up to speed and use Dalet Cut to collaborate on news stories for digital, social, TV and radio from anywhere.
• Produce digital-native content — The digital-first approach features templates to adjust aspect ratios for various video requirements, ensuring stories are prepared in the right shape and form. Users can write scripts, edit content, record narration, add graphics and manipulate captions. Innovative script-to-graphic and AI-powered translations enable users to add impactful narration graphics to stories quickly and easily.
• Collaborate better with story-centric workflows — Dalet Cut is natively connected to Dalet Pyramid planning calendars, assignments, rundowns, archives and more. With full access to Dalet Pyramid shared resources, users can easily collaborate and focus on story development and editorial decisions without the burden of trying to locate relevant content.  Dalet Pyramid gives Adobe Premiere Pro editors full access to the newsroom, boosting remote workflows.

Mathieu Zarouk, VP, product management, said: “Dalet Cut is designed for fast adoption. Its purpose-built feature-set gives newsrooms the competitive edge — especially when it comes to covering breaking stories — in any format, across every platform. The cloud-native solution supports growing files and remote rendering giving journalists a jumpstart on live story development and the added speed boost they need to ensure it is delivered on the fly from anywhere.”

Dalet said: “The fluid exchange of information between Dalet Cut and the Dalet Pyramid substantially improves productivity and collaboration for creating news stories. Existing Dalet Galaxy customers can benefit today from Dalet Pyramid centralized planning, remote editing and digital production ‘plug-and-play’ subscription-based solutions.”

Dalet Cut to Address Any Digital Content Production Workflow with Dalet Flex

An illustration of Dalet’s new single-technology stack approach, Dalet Cut will be available in Summer 2023 as part of the Dalet Flex media workflow platform. More than a news editor, Dalet Cut allows any content owner and storyteller to edit digital content such as sports and event highlights, short-form programs or social promos thanks to its multimedia and multiplatform production capabilities.

Attendees of the NAB Show (April 16-19 at the Las Vegas Convention Center), are invited to meet with Dalet leadership, product specialists, sales and professional services teams at booth W1935 to discuss their business and operational needs. To book a meeting, click here.

The post Dalet Releases Dalet Cut, Web-Based Editor appeared first on TV News Check.

Known for their expertise and best practice methodology in designing contemporary media asset management workflows, IMT is “well-positioned to fully leverage the Dalet portfolio of cloud-native media production, management and distribution solutions to enable digital and business transformation for clients,” Dalet says. Early collaborations include the implementation of Dalet Flex media supply chain capabilities to facilitate content packaging and delivery workflows on Amazon Web Services infrastructure for the Gamestar+ streaming service.

Jason Kranitz, IMT president, systems integration, says: “Dalet brings to the IMT portfolio 30 years of media experience packed into modern cloud-native solutions that will accelerate our customers’ ambitions and business. Dalet cloud-native solutions offer the agility for real transformation backed by a company with a customer centric ethos that makes this an outstanding partnership.”

As part of its solutions portfolio, IMT will offer Dalet’s cloud-native solutions and SaaS offerings, which include the media logistics solution Dalet Flex. Dalet integrates with CloudSoda data migration solution, supporting high-speed data movement that is agnostic to the underlying storage technology.

The post Dalet And IMT Extend Strategic Partnership To Reinvent MAM In The Cloud appeared first on TV News Check.

“The partnership with Dalet represents another important enrichment of our solutions portfolio,” said Francesco Moretti, group deputy CEO and CEO international of Fincons Group. “In the media industry, we bring extensive consultative and technology expertise to our customers, many of whom are Tier-1 players that are transforming operations digitally and migrating workflows into the cloud. We are committed to partnering with the leading technology providers to ensure we are always offering the most cutting-edge and responsive solutions as markets evolve. Dalet is a key player in supporting content supply chain transformation initiatives and perfectly matches our need to provide best-in-class solutions to our customers. The collaboration could also go far beyond the media industry as digital assets – and video in particular — are becoming vital for any organization in any industry. Fincons can count on dedicated business units looking after sectors such as financial services and insurance, energy and utility, manufacturing, transportation and others.”

“We recognize that nearly everyone today is a content creator and have designed our solutions to enable content workflows for both traditional media and entertainment organizations and those who are blazing new paths in storytelling across non-traditional media markets,” said Ewan Johnston, Dalet strategic alliances and channel partner director. “Fincons’ industrial portfolio combined with its M&E practice enables us to expand our reach and connect with new brands. Their trusted guidance and technology expertise will ensure success as customers transition to the cloud with Dalet.” Johnston said. “The partnership also enables us to expand our services and support to our existing customers as our cloud business grows.”

Fincons will offer as part of its solutions portfolio Dalet’s robust cloud-native solutions and SaaS offerings which include the media logistics solution Dalet Flex, and the news planning, production and distribution solution, Dalet Pyramid.

The post Dalet’s Partnership with Fincons Group Brings Cloud-Native Content Workflow Solutions To New Markets & Territories appeared first on TV News Check.

While the cloud enables speed and collaboration along with flexibility and redundancy, cloud operations can be costly. For instance, editing the high-resolution content the industry likes to work with on the cloud can be fairly expensive, so broadcasters may choose alternatives like working with lower-res proxies, hybrid workflows or remote editing.

Vendors are working to optimize the workflows and provide technologies that can further speed up content creation. The editing software and services are increasingly making available automation capabilities for tedious and time-consuming tasks.

Peter Abecassis, senior product marketing manager at Grass Valley, says broadcasters appreciate how the cloud helps with news team collaboration.

“The main goal is to collaborate, for efficiency, to have access to talent without moving them,” he says.

Not only does it allow people to work from anywhere, it makes it easier for people in different regions to work together, he says.

AMPP’s Framelight X media asset management system from Grass Valley includes an AI-powered speech-to-text workflow to speed up the creation of highlight packages in its HTML5 editor.

If a broadcaster wanted the top editors working on a project, but they were not available to work in the production suite, “you could grab someone from Dallas, Houston and Kansas City, and they could all work on the same project because it’s cloud based,” Abecassis says.

He says the company’s Framelight X includes an HTML5 editor that allows editors anywhere in the world with internet access to access the broadcaster’s media assets. Whether the file resides in studio storage or in the cloud, he says, “it looks like one massive storage system to any user.”

Grass Valley is also working on “any automation we can bring on board” to speed up content creation workflows, he says.

“A lot of our tools are geared around how to take content — specifically live content — and turn it around quickly, to help media producers maximize the revenue they get for a specific event,” Abecassis says.

Bitcentral Chief Operating Officer Sam Peterson says he’s seen a trend toward having ubiquitous access to source content for collaborative editing. A couple of years ago, Bitcentral and Nexstar collaborated to complete re-write Bitcentral’s Create browser-based editor to provide that kind of capability. Create, initially, was designed to be used inside the station.

“It’s cloud-friendly. Anyone anywhere any time can access all the content they have access to,” he says. “We spent a lot of time and energy building that out.”

Bitcentral’s Create maximizes the value of media through enhanced editing capabilities and workflow efficiencies at faster speed through a simple and feature-rich user interface that is available anywhere.

He also says broadcasters want technologies that help them do things more quickly.

“One of the key factors 20 years ago and still today is ‘how fast can I turn this content, get that content distributed to a consumer?’” he says. “For us, the focus has been speed, and what does the cloud do for speed?”

One of the things that can drive efficiencies for news teams is to have centralized content, whether that be on the cloud or servers, Daniel Webster, Blackbird’s VP Americas, says. Once that content is centralized, it’s possible to have the best editors and journalists working on the content.

The point, he says, is to make it as easy as possible to edit content, and a centralized creation tool like Blackbird can do that.

“It’s about simplicity of workflow and making it really easy for anyone in a newsroom” or out in the field to edit, Webster says.

Blackbird provides Sky News Arabia universal access to video for edit story creation and multiplatform publishing, enabling news, sports and media organizations to reach their audiences wherever they are.

One of the big problems that Blackbird wants to solve is the “equation that it takes an hour to create one minute of video,” he says. “That’s a fundamentally crazy metric which we want to tear apart.”

And artificial intelligence is on the company’s roadmap as a way to help speed the creation and editing processes, according to Blackbird CEO Ian McDonough.

“The way we think about our product in the future is the hub where all those different technologies can be integrated,” McDonough says. “It’s all about speed. Speed in news is better for the viewer, better for the business.”

Emeka Okoli, Zixi’s VP for business solutions and customer success, says reducing latency is a priority for broadcasters.

“Reducing latency in live production is critical,” he says. “The sooner the content gets there, edited and marked up for additional curation for specific regions, the better you are for getting content to your viewership. It’s a bit of a race.”

Zixi’s platform allows for a stream and store function, as well as store and stream.

With those features, Okoli says, a journalist can “capture events on the move and be able to not worry about setting a time and being stationary before pushing it to the cloud.”

Chris Braehler, VP of product at SDVI, says the move toward editing in the cloud has accelerated greatly, with some broadcasters jumping straight to cloud and some using remote editing and on-prem machines.

“The technology was the same, whether it was in the cloud or on-prem, the remote part of this,” he says. “A hurdle of remote editing solutions was around editors feeling the responsiveness of the tool not quite the same.”

SDVI’s Rally Access is a metadata-assisted content QC and compliance service. It combines content and metadata on the editor’s timeline, guiding them to the right moment and track where content requires their attention.

And there tend to be two main schools of thinking around cloud editing, he adds.

Proxy editing is when the user edits a proxy, low-res version of the content locally on the user’s machine.

In this case, “only the edits that I’ve done are sent to the cloud where the high-res version is, and the conforming and rendering of the edit happens in the cloud. The editor has the machine locally, and it feels snappier,” Braehler says.

The other option is to edit high-res content, but move the editing software, such as Adobe Premier, into the cloud.

While the editor is working on the high-res version, he says, some editors don’t prefer that approach because of the “microsecond of delay there.”

SDVI’s Rally Access works with both approaches, he says.

Flexibility is also something broadcasters want.

Alan Dabul, product manager for media asset management at Ross Video, says most of the Ross customers’ workflows tend more toward remote access than cloud.

“Most of our customers are on-prem and only pieces of the workflow are cloud,” he says. “We’re starting to see more customers interested in exploring what’s possible.”

In short, he says, the video-heavy workflows are done on-prem with video editing done remotely via VPN that pulls a proxy to the local edit base and sends exports back to the on-prem facility.

“They want some of their staff accessing the content on-prem to do the workflows on premises, especially the video editing process” for 4K and 8K video, he says. “It just costs too much, and it’s unfeasible to provide remote access for some of those workflows.”

Ross’s Primestream solutions are capable of living completely in the cloud, he says, and they “look the same if it’s on-prem or in the cloud.”

Ross Video’s Primestream simplifies and accelerates cloud and on-prem content creation by providing remote video editing workflows directly integrated with Adobe Premiere Pro.

Editing can be done through an Adobe Premiere plug-in that allows editors to interact with content from shared storage, whether the editors are on-prem or remotely accessing the content, Dabul says. Editors can also do rough cuts and create a sequence for content that integrates with the Adobe Premiere workflow where it can be passed to an editor for elements like titles, graphics and transitions, he says.

Mathieu Zarouk, director of product marketing at Dalet, says there are three main families of solutions available for broadcasters seeking to use cloud editing. The simplest are fast clipping quick-turnaround workflows, followed by full-fledged web editors, he says. The traditional editing tools can also be deployed in the cloud, he says.

Dalet Media Cortex is an AI service platform designed to leverage cognitive services and machine learning.

Typically, the clipping tools enable fast turnaround and publishing require little editing, but are useful when time is of the essence, such as for live feeds or sports events, Zarouk says. The web-based editors are alternatives to traditional non-linear editing (NLE) programs like Premiere or Media Composer, he says, while the traditional editing tools have cloud-based options, typically enabled by a third party through an asset management system, he says.

“We’ve been working quite a lot this year to better enable traditional NLEs in remote settings. For instance, with Adobe Premiere, we can now enable proxy-based workflows and remote rendering workflows,” he says. “Dalet Flex will take care of analyzing the project, relinking the high-resolution files instead of the proxy files. Basically, still relying on this traditional NLE tool that is in Premiere, but enabling cloud-compatible workflows.”

Jim Politis, the Max Cloud product manager at The Weather Company, says Max Cloud gives stations the ability to store and access their weather content in the cloud, although it’s not itself a video editor. Velocity, however, gives Max Cloud users the ability to assemble a story from the browser.

The Weather Company’s Max Velocity gives Max Cloud users the ability to assemble a story from the browser.

“In Velocity you can create stories and control of all the media content you want as part of your story,” Politis says.

Velocity, released April 2022, allows for basic trimming of the video content.

“It streamlines story creation so you can apply story clips at the time of recording,” he says. “It reduces the need to use a full on video editor before publication.”

Raul Alba, Avid’s director of market solutions, says the cloud is a tool that broadcasters can use and shouldn’t be considered a goal.

The company offers Edit on Demand and Media Central, which are normally aimed at different users, he says, but “one edit could be started in the easier-to-use Media Central web interface and finished in the more complex Edit On Demand interface,” which uses the Media Composer editor.

He says Avid has been working on web-based technologies to ensure the Media Central web interface is easy to use and reactive with as many features as possible but still light enough that it works anywhere.

The Edit on Demand offering makes available Avid’s Media Composer editor in a flexible way, with users paying as they go for what they use, he says.

When it comes to market needs and technologies, Alba says broadcasters need efficiency more than disruption.

“They are more worried about being efficient and being lean, rather than looking for the next big disruption, the next big thing,” he says. “I think 2023 will be the year of efficiency and flexibility.”

The post Cloud Editing Embraces More Flexibility, Efficiency appeared first on TV News Check.

“We’ve really done a lot of educating on how important it is to be able to tag things appropriately because then it’s much easier to discover it,” Strouse-Kenney told the audience at TVNewsCheck’s NewsTECHForum on Tuesday in New York City. “It’s an uphill battle, but the idea of getting all this content into a singular repository that we can all access, as things come up, we can look back.”

The anecdote was shared during a panel discussion, Creating More Content for a Multimedia Audience, moderated by TVNewsCheck Editor Michael Depp. It highlighted the importance of improved visibility and transparency within networks as publishers scramble to fill time with quality content across a growing number of channels, without overly taxing resources and budgets.

Strouse-Kenney said Court TV has taken the same approach to the development of other content steeped heavily in archival materials. When Showtime premiered a docuseries devoted to Phil Spector, the late music producer who was convicted of murder in 2009, Court TV refurbished archived trial footage into a new package.

The archived content doesn’t even have to be so old that it drums up feelings of nostalgia for it to hit audiences hard. Strouse-Kenney said she recently stumbled across tagged coverage of the war in Ukraine from earlier this year that hadn’t made it into an initial linear broadcast.

“We put it up on YouTube; we had over five million views,” Strouse-Kenney said. “Those are the types of nuggets that, if we can make things easier to discover, there is really long tail value on a lot of the content you already have.”

Though a worthwhile endeavor, Strouse-Kenney observed that the process of digitizing old tapes and tagging them with useful metadata sometimes feels like an “overwhelming” proposition. But new technology can help. AI-driven machines can generate transcriptions, embed metadata into digitally converted tapes and even offer recommendations of content that might pair well with previous searches. There’s also cloud technology that makes access to content across a company far more widespread, spurring greater collaboration possibilities.

“[There’s] a great opportunity for technology to show what it is it can do to help people work on the same thing,” said Stephane Guez, co-founder and CTO of Dalet. “Before, other [collaborators] were in the same room; now they are not necessarily in the same room, they are across nations. [There’s] this notion of being able to work around a platform that provides a space where you can see what everyone is doing.”

This new reality, Guez pointed out, helps keep those with creative minds focused on creative productivity instead of taking on rudimentary tasks that ultimately feel as though they function as a mere time-suck.

“You really want everyone to produce things together and contribute to the production of content that, in the end, is going to be more effective,” Guez said.

Sinclair Broadcast Group has partnered with Sony to develop another tech tool to help speed up productivity and boost transparency and visibility. Ernie Ensign, senior director of news technology at Sinclair, said five of his company’s stations are working with a camera innovation on a pilot basis, allowing a photographer in the field to upload footage to a cloud-based grid, which the digital team can access immediately.

“If it’s a big breaking story the digital team can grab video and produce for the website or mobile app while the story is being shot,” Depp said. Ensign explained the footage is also tagged with metadata by the photographer as it’s uploaded to the cloud, joining other metadata-rich content in the company’s repository.

“You don’t know what you have until somebody can look at it,” Ensign said. “Crews out in the field don’t always communicate [what they’ve captured] effectively enough and we find in certain instances there’s content there that [is] visible to producers back at the station and they may [recognize] that it’s great to blast out everywhere.”

Discoverability of footage also allows breaking news producers to realize the possibilities of multiple stories built out of coverage secured in one sitting, perhaps with the addition of broader context, Ensign said.

Publishing companies would do well to leverage their entire network as well — a much easier proposition with all the innovative tools on the market that allow for greater collaboration between newsrooms. A number of organizations are generating content out of centralized teams, with affiliates producing related stories in concert, specially iterated for a local audience. Gray Television’s InvestigateTV is one outlet that has effectively adopted this approach.

“Whenever they have a national investigation that’s getting ready to roll out, they’ll send all the markets individual data for that particular market if the market wants to localize or even customize that investigation for their viewers,” said Lisa Allen, Gray’s VP and GM of Washington operations.

She disclosed that regional markets are coming together to build capitol bureau reporter positions who provide far-reaching political reporting emanating out of state government hubs and cited the recent documentary Bridging the Great Health Divide as another example of Gray’s group-wide collaborative efforts that paid off. InvestigateTV, Gray’s D.C. bureau and stations in other markets worked together to produce the hour-long film about various health concerns in the Mississippi Delta and Appalachia.

Fox Television Stations’ 24/7 streamer LiveNow also leverages the production power of the company’s 17 O&O stations to aggregate — or, as Depp put it, “DJ” — news from across the country. Emily Stone, VP of digital content operations, said a key to the entire operation is LiveNow’s producers being able to inform its partners about its mission and what content they’re looking for.

“It is a lot of communication and process,” Stone said. “We have to know what’s out there in order to know what our best options are and be able to prioritize 25 stories from multiple places.”

All these technological advancements and aspirations for greater collaboration and more robust productivity are only as impactful as the rate unto which they are utilized, however. Getting employees to alter habits and workflows may be tricky and challenging, but it’s necessary for integration of these solutions.

“You really have to show them the value of what they’re doing, you have to make it easy and show them that ‘If you do X, here’s the result,’” Ensign said. “You just have to keep working toward change.”

For more NewsTECHForum 2022 stories, click here.

The post With New Tech, Stations Are Finding Creative, Different Paths To Generate More Content appeared first on TV News Check.

Panelists are Lisa Allen, VP and GM of Washington operations at Gray Television; Ernie Ensign, senior director of news technology at Sinclair Broadcast Group; Vanessa Strouse-Kenney, VP and head of digital, Scripps News and Court TV, The E.W. Scripps Co.; Emily Stone, VP digital content operations, Fox Television Stations; and Stephane Guez, co-founder and CTO of Dalet. TVNewsCheck Editor Michael Depp will moderate the 1 p.m. discussion.

“TV newsrooms need to make more content than ever to push across more platforms with limited to no additional staff to do it,” Depp said. “To make it work, they’re turning to hubbing, news sharing and collaboration and tools like AI, the cloud and emerging video acquisition strategies. Lisa, Ernie, Vanessa, Emily and Stephane will present each of their own approaches to making more news and the tools and technologies they rely on to make it possible.”

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

Register here for NewsTECHForum.

The post NewsTECHForum: Creating More Content For A Multimedia Audience appeared first on TV News Check.

While AI and related technologies can remove manual process from broadcast workflows, vendors are largely focusing on making it easier for journalists to use the media they have. AI-powered tools are helping journalists efficiently find trending topics that audiences care about, as well as surface content on those stories.

Not all AI engines are created equal, but they can generate automated transcriptions and perform facial or object recognition on fresh or archival footage, tagging that media with metadata to make it easily searchable. That technology can also help with things like generating highlights clips, caption compliance, rights management and content moderation.

AI Finds Trends

Tim Wolff, Futuri’s VP for TV and digital publishing innovation, says he’s mostly seeing local stations use AI tools to help replace mundane repetitive tasks typically done by humans. AI-driven transcription, for example, is a “big time and money saver” because “logging sound bites used to take forever,” he says.

Futuri’s TopicPulse is intended to help journalists find news relevant to their audience. Based on “10 years of AI crunching data,” it predicts the stories an audience will care about, he says.

“It brings a massive amount of data to bear for you to use,” Wolff says. It tells a journalist that “people care about this and will keep caring about it for the next few hours.”

It also helps a journalist tell whether a topic is truly trending with the audience of if there’s just a single social media post that took off, he adds.

X.News’ Conceptor, launched in April 2021, automatically analyzes the assets coming into the system and tells the user what is “dynamically growing and bubbling,” says Andreas Pongratz, CEO at X.News.

Emerging Topics from X.News

“They don’t need to search if they don’t want to,” Pongratz says. “They are getting told what’s happening in their area of interest.”

He says the system provides game-changing support for journalists.

“There’s no search needed. The system tells them what’s happening. They select the topic, click on premium search, and get those articles,” he says.

TVU Networks CEO Paul Shen says AI-powered tools can help a media organization “be the first one to bring the news to their audience” because they make it possible to help news people find relevant raw material quickly.

“If you talk about AI, at the end of the day, it’s about speed and efficiency,” Shen says.

TVU Media Mind, for instance, helps find relevant content on a given topic and push that out over social media quickly, he says. In the past, he adds, such an activity could take an hour or more, but now it takes 10 minutes or less.

Removing The Grunt Work

News production is full of time-consuming tasks, notes Rob Gonsalves, engineering fellow at Avid.

“Someone putting together a story could spend a lot of time doing grunt work,” Gonsalves says. “AI is good at that.”

For example, he says, it takes a long time for humans to sift through footage when seeking specific content, but AI makes it possible to efficiently find content by tagging it with metadata.

“It’s a lot easier to search for things if it’s been transcribed,” he says.

Raoul Cospen, director of business development at Dalet, says speech-to-text tools continue to improve.

“Out-of-the-box engines like speech-to-text are really major. They work with many different languages that can provide good out-of-the-box captions,” he says.

Dalet Media Cortex

Dalet already offers a tool that analyzes stories and transcripts of videos in the system to generate keywords that can be used to recommend fresh content or content from the archive to be used in a new story, he says.

“It’s like making a search based on keywords in an automated way. We do that thanks to what we call natural language processing, which is a text-based technology to extract keywords and give meaning to them,” he says.

The next iteration of this technology, he says, will likely be based mainly on semantic encoding of text content to improve the accuracy of the recommendations.

Octopus Newsroom, which produces newsroom computer systems, also provides a speech-to-text feature to free up journalistic resources that would be better spent elsewhere.

“We actually have an open platform to work with different engines because some tools are very good with English, but not necessarily good with other languages, so we have support for many different language tools that can do speech to text,” says Gabriel Janko, Octopus COO, who notes that automatic translation services are also in the pipeline.

“All the text coming back from the speech-to-text engine is indexed by our search engine, so if you are searching for any that may have been said, it will show you the video,” he adds. “You can click on the particular word, and it will show you exactly where the person said it.”

Octopus also offers facial and object recognition to identify the presence of a character or object in video content even before staffers watch it. That recognition can range from specific people and things — President Biden, for instance — to more abstract examples like fires or flood, Janko says. He notes the service can also integrate with speech to text allowing a user to click on the word or proper noun in the transcript, bringing them right to the moment(s) in the video when it appears.

Processing Archives

Archives are also a lot easier to sort through when content has gone through facial or object recognition, transcriptions and other AI engines, tagging that content with metadata to make it more searchable.

Tim Camara, senior product manager at Veritone, says AI engines are not created equally, so the company works with a range of first- and third-party “best of breed” AI engines to meet customer needs. For example, one celebrity recognition engine may work better for news figures while another one works better for sports figures, he says.

Camara says Veritone can automatically run content through AI engines during ingest.

Jacob Leveton, director of product management at Veritone, says the company is working with CBS News and other news agencies to process current content. This is helpful for creating and licensing clips of news hosts talking about certain topics, he says.

Archives projects can turn up valuable footage, he adds.

“Digitalizing everything, making it digital and searchable can uncover a lot of opportunity for them,” Leveton says.

As far as Avid’s Gonsalves is concerned, it’s all in the metadata. In the past, humans would have to tag content with metadata, but now AI systems “are really smart” at tagging content with metadata, and such approaches typically append more metadata to content than a human would.

Avid’s Phrase Find can help find specific phrases in content, using AI to search for phrases phonetically.

“In the last four to five years, it can recognize famous people, transcribe the words that they’re saying, populate a database with who was at a press conference and what words were spoken,” he says.

Avid’s Media Composer uses Phrase Find and Media Central uses a similar tool called Dialogue Search to help find specific phrases in content. The tools use AI to search for phrases phonetically, he says.

Currently, he says, the systems are only able to look for verbatim content, but the ability to search for paraphrased content is an area of research, and Gonzalves has submitted a paper on the topic for the October SMPTE Media Technology Summit.

Moderation, Clips And Highlights Help

Saket Dandotia, COO of VideoVerse/Magnifi, says AI helps with tasks like content moderation and ad insertion. And in the world of sports, it can make it possible to “watch an entire match in five minutes, he says.”

VideoVerse’s Magnifi technology uses AI to detect key moments in games, such as goals or fouls, and to track a ball or player, he says.

In addition to flagging and clipping highlights in sports, it can also predict the outcome of a match based on analysis of data, he says.

Veritone’s Camara says that clients still tend to prefer to “have a human in the loop at some point” when it comes to automated clip creation, but that the company is working to make it easier for AI to be part of the workflow.

He also says AI can also perform copyright checks on content that’s going out to ensure a media organization doesn’t expose itself to legal risk.

Futuri’s Wolff says media organizations should not seek out AI-powered technology merely to be able to do tasks faster, but to provide better news coverage and how it can help make journalism better. When it comes to the AI tools that are being created, he says, “the end goal needs to be, for all of us, how are we improving journalism and how are we serving our viewers better?”

As technologies come to the market, workers often worry that such technologies will leave them without a job. TVU’s Shen doesn’t believe that’s the case with AI, which he says won’t be smarter than people for a long time.

“I don’t believe that AI can replace people. AI makes the process more efficient. For now, people will be the one who make the story. The AI makes the media easy to use,” Shen says. “Customers who don’t use AI become much less competitive.”

The post AI Lightens The Newsgathering Load appeared first on TV News Check.

Sinclair’s Cloud Control

During the pandemic Sinclair Broadcast Group implemented a new workflow for sports production called “Cloud Control” that it developed with its mobile truck vendor, Mobile TV Group. The new scheme was designed to “essentially remote some of the functionalities from remote trucks during [professional] games back to the studios and the regions that are televising them,” said Don Roberts, Sinclair SVP of sports engineering and production systems.

Don Roberts

With Cloud Control, there are five to six people at the RSN that Sinclair doesn’t send to the game, including a director, producer, replay operator and a couple of graphics operators. Those personnel stay home and are able, via an IP connection, to remotely control devices in the truck and see their camera feeds on a multiviewer back at the studio. (Sinclair has successfully used both JPEG-2000 XS compression as well as SRT for video backhauls.)

“The key to that is low latency,” Roberts said. “We’ve tried a couple different variations of that over the course of the last two years, and we have it now in a place where we make it work pretty well.”

Sinclair has installed Cloud Control rooms in most of its RSNs at this point, and now is looking at adding more remote capability to allow an RSN to handle multiple games per day. But the RSNs haven’t expanded their use of remote production much beyond Cloud Control. Now that the COVID-19 situation has improved, they are back to sending large production teams to cover MLB games. If teams from two RSNs are playing each other, Roberts said, there may be as many as 60 production personnel onsite.

A new remote production venture for Sinclair is underway at Tennis Channel, which a few months ago began covering the fast-growing racquet sport of pickleball. Tennis Channel has already covered about five or six pickleball tournaments at various locations across the U.S. Not all of the coverage airs on Tennis Channel, with some of it going to other networks or streaming platforms.

The production team at Tennis Channel headquarters in Santa Monica, Calif., has developed a workflow where it sends two or three people to pickleball venue and sets up a mix of manned, pan/tilt/zoom and POV cameras, including autotracking cameras and LiDAR technology. Everything else is done remotely, including switching of cameras, graphics and replay.

“We’re literally doing an eight or nine-camera completely remote, with the exception of two camera operators,” Roberts said.

How transmission is handled depends on what type of connectivity exists at the venue, with four or five different scenarios ranging from traditional fiber links to bonded cellular systems.

Tennis Channel has about five more pickleball events to cover in 2022 including stops in Las Vegas, Washington, and Orlando, Fla. Sinclair is considering building a small production trailer, perhaps 20 feet long, that can be towed by a pickup truck and used to haul the pickleball production gear around. Staying small is key for pickleball, which is often held at compact venues that can’t accommodate the large mobile trucks traditionally used for professional sports coverage.

“What we’ve learned is that if we can do things remotely — not necessarily the cloud, but just remote production — we’re going to do that,” Roberts said. “We’re huge fans of that. And our Tennis [Channel] people are in the forefront of doing not just pickleball, but tennis tournaments all over the world, remotely. We’re sending now a fraction of the production people we used to send to tennis events.”

For WLS, Connectivity Remains Challenging

ABC O&O WLS Chicago was fortunate during the pandemic to have ample space to allow for social distancing of personnel in the building, so day-to-day news production “wasn’t a huge hurdle,” said Brad Plant, executive director of technology for the station. WLS also does an extensive amount of non-news remote production in its market, with a dozen community events a year including parades, auto shows and festivals. All of those are live event productions similar to sports.

Along with spurring the adoption of new technologies, the pandemic has made viewers more accepting of new production styles, Plant said.

Brad Plant

“I think the pandemic has changed the way that we, as content creators, and our viewers look at news and sports production,” he said. “There are more acceptable production techniques like Zoom, and similar products, that may not have been looked at prepandemic. We’re trying to look at new technologies out there that allow us to bring people together not just for collaboration, but for production, and see how far we can push them as we [go] past this pandemic era.”

WLS’s goal is to use technology that is as flexible as possible with several options for connectivity, which remains the biggest challenge for remote production. Covering a parade is far different that rolling up to a sports venue like Wrigley Field that has ample fiber connectivity.

“Every event we do we have to be able to pivot to the type of event, the demands that the production team needs, and especially our connectivity, which is the big thing,” Plant said.

The station is in the midst of building a 20-foot mobile production trailer that will be able to support a wide range of production techniques. It will be able to do a traditional remote model with a full production team including a TD and director where everything is produced onsite, and the program feed is streamed back to the station via fiber, microwave, satellite or bonded connection. A second option is a full REMI model where all the camera feeds are brought back to the station and the show is produced there.

But the challenge there is bandwidth and connectivity, Plant said.

“Can we get eight camera feeds back to our station reliably and with low latency, and give that director the same experience they would otherwise have with an on-site production?”

A third option is a hybrid model, where the gear is located onsite in the production trailer but is being remotely controlled from the station, including switching between camera feeds. Latency is also a big factor there, both for viewing the video as well as communicating to staff in the field.

“You’ve got to have low latency for communicating to the production staff in the field while the director and producer sit back at the station,” Plant said.

The Starlink LEO (low Earth orbit) satellite service isn’t available yet in the Chicago market, but Plant thinks that it has great promise for supporting such low-latency communications. However, he doesn’t see it as an option for video transfer from the field due to its relatively low upload capacity.

While WLS make use of bonded cellular connectivity for newsgathering when possible, big events like parades with thousands of cellphone users competing for bandwidth sometimes make that untenable for long-form live production.

“We still heavily rely on microwave, and we’re fortunate to have a large microwave infrastructure here in the city,” Plant said.

Gray Refines Its Work From Home Game

With the improvements in the COVID-19 situation, Gray Television stations have brought many of their employees back to the building, said Clint Moore, director of broadcast operations for Gray, but they still have remote production options available.

Clint Moore

Many pieces of remote production technology that Gray relied on through the pandemic had actually been in place for years beforehand, Moore said, “but we never really got around to testing it.” The onset of the pandemic forced the issue, and in three to five days Gray went from stations full of people to “very skeleton staffs,” with producers, directors, anchors and even master control operators working from home.

Happily, the IP-based systems that Gray had put in place worked well and personnel were quick to adapt, including some getting a quick education in the fine points of home broadband service. While most staffers have returned to their seats at the stations, some personnel have continued in a 100% work-from-home, remote model.

“They’re assigned different duties, different regions, they get up and are scheduled and they know what they’re supposed to do for the day,” Moore said. “And they’re able to remote in from home and help those stations out, in case there are sick calls or somebody is short-staffed.”

Moore feels like the group is well prepared for future crises such as COVID-19. On that note, in the past week Gray provided remote production assistance to several stations impacted by Hurricane Ian.

Gray is continuing to invest in new technology that makes it seamless to work either at the station or from home. That includes buying new laptops and replacing traditional dual monitors in the newsroom with a single, large monitor with a docking port for a laptop, a compact combination that also works well in a home environment.

“When you try to come up with a remote workflow for an employee from their home, some folks don’t have a lot of room,” Moore said. “So, you’ve got make sure that the equipment we’re going to roll into their home is going to work properly, and it’s not going to take up their whole living area or bedroom or kitchen.”

For Dalet, Lure Of The Public Cloud

COVID-19 accelerated broadcasters’ adoption of public cloud technology for production by four to five years, said Frederic Roux, SVP of worldwide enterprise sales for Dalet. He added that using the cloud to provide tools to a remote workforce can be a more cost-effective solution than investing in a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

Frederic Roux

“At Dalet, we’ve always been a big proponent of leveraging cloud, specifically for news and sports,” Roux said. “A lot of that relates to scaling production cycles. Depending on where you are, you need more or less people producing, you have big events, it makes sense to have on the back end an infrastructure that auto-scales with your needs.”

Dalet was already in the process of shifting its software products to cloud technology and web-based applications, and the pandemic sped up that development as well. The company has released a whole new generation of Web-based tools for news production and collaboration called Pyramid.

The concept of Pyramid, Roux said, “is really your laptop as your desktop, being able to do your ingest, your edit, your news planning, your playout from a Web-based interface. To get away a little bit from heavy investments in a VDI infrastructure and the like.”

Pyramid is designed to work on either public or private cloud platforms, and Roux said Dalet has several customers interested in running the software in their own data centers. He noted that the economics of the public cloud can vary widely depending on a broadcaster’s size, and said private cloud is still “a very attractive opportunity for people who can achieve centralization of resources” such as large media companies with diverse businesses beyond news.

“So that if you have to serve 20, 30 or 200 local stations, you can work with one central system, one central facility, as opposed to deploying multiple systems all around the U.S.,” Roux said. “So, I think there is cross-pollination between the need for remote production and the attraction of the public cloud to enable a lot of auto-scaling. But moving to public cloud, for a company like us, opens a lot more avenues in terms of hosting a system to create a true centralized production hub, that can serve a user at home or a user in a different location.”

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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 World We Knew

It is just another day at work, newsrooms are trying to produce stories as fast as possible. News breaks, the producer assigns a story, and the journalist hits the road. Once in the field, the journalist shoots footage, assembles a rough cut, and heads back to the newsroom. After getting content from the on-premises system and working with the video editor, the news professional gets approvals and finally send the story to the rundown. Does it sound familiar?

To produce a story, the journalist had to meet several people and depend on a physical newsroom. At that time, we could travel and meet anyone anywhere. Going back and forth to the newsroom was not a big deal, until our circumstances changed. We had to be spread apart and confined in our own spaces. The ability to produce news was jeopardized, and the newsroom dynamic as we knew it was gone.

Remote and hybrid work are here to stay and newsrooms must adjust

A New Wave in (Remote) News Production

There is something we learnt from the pandemic: things will never be the same. Even if most lockdowns were lifted, remote and hybrid work is not going anywhere. Newsrooms must adjust and implement different strategies to produce stories in this new context.

At Dalet, we designed collaborative tools for news professionals to thrive in any environment. We recently introduced The Dalet Pyramid Remote Editing solution, a platform that extends the power of newsroom systems outside their physical location, having no need for the producer or any journalist to be in the newsroom. Our vision is to make news creators — producers, editors, journalists, etc. — feel that all are in the same space, collaborating and crafting news together, even when they are miles apart.

The remote-native solution is a platform to produce and edit news stories. Journalists have access to assignments, the newsroom’s content, and production tools in real- time, allowing the team to have an immersive experience.

The “plug and play” Remote Editing solution is offered in subscription to allow customers to use what they need, when they need it, and scale as they grow.

New Tools for News Production

Pyramid Cut: Web-Based, Fast-Paced Media Editor

Pyramid Cut, our browser-based multimedia editor, was specifically designed for modern news storytelling. The cloud-native solution was built around the journalist’s needs when producing and editing video stories. We conveyed all aspects of news story editing in an intuitive format for professional and non-professional editors.

A browser-based editor, Pyramid Cut is designed for modern news storytelling

Pyramid Cut is more than a media editing tool, it is an entire collaborative ecosystem for news creators. Besides offering the expected transitions, graphic generation, and voice over recording, it allows journalists access to media, scripts, and assignments — features shared with Dalet Pyramid’s Centralized Planning solution. This fluid exchange of information between Pyramid Cut and Pyramid planner, substantially improves productivity and quality when creating news stories.

One of the most significant features of Pyramid Cut is the ability to work with growing files, allowing the journalist to start editing without having to wait for the live streaming to be over. The journalist or editor can access the video files from the cloud and edit a preview for a digital team or the rundown.

Pyramid Xtend: Native Plug-In for Adobe Premiere Pro

Pyramid Xtend gives journalists seamless integration between Dalet Pyramid, and Adobe Premiere Pro. Pyramid Xtend allows Premiere Pro users to access media, scripts, even edit on the cloud using remote rendering through Adobe Media Encoder. This major improvement enables Adobe Premiere users to fully join the newsroom’s operation.

Dalet X-tend seamlessly connects Pyramid with Adobe Premiere

For newsrooms using Dalet Galaxy, video editors not only access media, scripts, and assignments inside Pyramid Cut or Pyramid Xtend; they also have access to the newsroom content inside Dalet Galaxy. These elements are fully integrated to produce rich and collaborative experiences for journalists and editors when creating stories.

Let’s get into more detail about how the media, scripts and assignments are orchestrated in Dalet Pyramid to enable a true collaborative workflow.

Media Bin

The Media Bin is a bucket where all the digital assets concerning a specific news story are gathered. Those assets could be video and audio files, pictures, graphics, PDFs, social posts, wires, external links, etc. The Media Bin also includes rushes, and the final versions for different angles: TV, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc.

By keeping all assets for a story in one place, Media Bin encourages a new level of collaboration

The Media Bin encourages a new level of collaboration. Its content can be accessed by broadcast or digital teams working on the same story. Even a broadcast crew in another facility can access the Media Bin. So, what’s the benefit? It allows Digital and broadcast teams — in any location — to use, not only source materials to craft their own stories, but to repurpose each other’s stories. This collaborative method reduces duplication of work, maximizes productivity and improves publication time.

Script Editor

The Script editor is the section where journalists write the story that will be played from the production control room. The journalist can, in real-time, collaboratively write the script with another journalist. The Script Editor connects to the teleprompter, allowing the newscaster to read directly during the broadcast.

With Script Editor, the journalist can collaboratively write with another journalist in real time

Within Pyramid Cut, the editor also has access to the assignment view — right next to the Media Bin and Script editor. The editor sees the assignments and the track of the story.

With these elements, seamlessly designed in Pyramid Cut, we are giving full visibility and enhancing productivity for news creators.

The Best of Both Worlds

There are certain benefits for newsrooms using both media editors. Pyramid Cut can be the go-to for journalists in the field or in the newsrooms, while Pyramid Xtend, for Adobe Premiere Pro editors, can be used for more advanced editing jobs and long-form content.

Both, Pyramid Cut and Adobe Premier Pro — are fully immersed in the Dalet ecosystem, having access to the Media Bin, Script Editor, assignments, and Dalet Galaxy’s content. The editors can also access the Dalet Pyramid planner, Dalet AmberFin, Dalet Media Cortex, and other tools of the Dalet ecosystem.

Let’s Do it Together!

What once was an unviable idea became a vital solution for millions of broadcasters and companies worldwide to thrive in our new reality. Incorporating Dalet’s remote Editing solutions into your newsroom is not a matter of improving processes but about belonging to a new norm.

Contact us to discover the Dalet Pyramid Remote Editing solution. We will show you how it can extend your news production capabilities to tell and share news stories.

With over a decade of experience in media production and entrepreneurship, Luis Fernandez is a dedicated marketer focused on positioning and go-to-market strategies. Luis has worked in the music and film industry, Tech-startups, and consulting. He is the senior product marketing manager at Dalet, for the News solutions. More Articles By Luis

The post How to produce news remotely appeared first on TV News Check.

Dalet solutions featured include Dalet Flex media logistics, Dalet Pyramid next-gen news solutions and the Dalet Galaxy broadcast workflow platform

Solutions shown on the Dalet IBC2022 stand include:

Dalet Flex is the award-winning, cloud-native media logistics solution used by media-rich organizations to produce, manage, distribute and monetize content. It features web-based, user-friendly collaborative tools and automation capabilities that have been proven to shorten workflows for review and approval, content library management, multiplatform distribution, and packaging content for localization and OTT by up to 50% and reduce direct costs by up to 70%.

The IBC2022 Dalet Flex showcase will feature both Dalet Flex for teams, the SaaS, multi-tenanted offering delivering media workflows as a service, and Dalet Flex for enterprises, the tailor-made media and content supply chain platform.

Dalet Unified News Operations solutions are uniquely positioned to solve the pain points of modern, end-to-end news workflows: planning, collaboration, remote editing, and digital news production. As such, it is ideal for news organizations with multiple stations, newsrooms with both broadcast and digital teams, digital-only news outlets, and distributed news organizations.

Dalet Pyramid, the next-gen news solution, brings newsrooms into a new era. Powerful cloud-native services combined with advanced mobility, a state-of-the-art user interface, collaborative web-based tools, and Storytelling 360 offer greater ROI for customers while simultaneously providing a non-disruptive journey to the cloud.

Complementing the Dalet Flex and Dalet Unified News Operations showcases are the award-winning Dalet AmberFin media processing solution; the Dalet CubeNG suite of tools to design, manage and playout high-quality 3D graphics; the Dalet Brio high-density SD, HD, and UHD broadcast I/O platform; the Dalet Media Cortex AI service platform designed to leverage cognitive services and machine learning everywhere, and Dalet OnePlay the next-gen automated live studio production solution.

The post IBC: Dalet To Feature Solutions For Media Logistics, Next-Gen News, Broadcast Workflows appeared first on TV News Check.

As they have gained experience in multiplatform production—publishing stories to their websites, mobile apps and social media channels while continuing to pump out traditional 30- and 60-minute newscasts­ — stations and networks have reorganized their news workflows to foster better collaboration between their linear and digital teams. At the same time, technology vendors have updated their products to better accommodate the multiple endpoints that today’s news needs to hit.

Broadcasters and vendors have talked for years of adopting a “storycentric” approach to news production that is based on serving multiple platforms instead of one tied to the traditional newscast and its regimented rundown. The challenge has long been that linear and digital news stories are generally produced by different teams using different systems, with the broadcast team relying on rundown-based newsroom computer systems (NRCS) and the digital team working with storycentric content management systems (CMS) like WordPress or Joomla.

And often these teams are located in different parts of the building — although some newer broadcast facilities, like NBC Universal’s Boston Media Center that opened in January 2020, feature a common newsroom with a central assignment desk which all teams report into.

Broadcasters have discussed combining the functionality of a NRCS and CMS in one system, but vendors say that isn’t tenable as broadcast and digital teams truly need the functionality of their specialized tools. But there has been significant progress in allowing the NRCS and CMS — and the disparate teams that use them — to communicate better with each other as well as third-party software. The overall goal is to be able to do more from one interface and cut down on the need for journalists to be working across multiple screens with different logins.

Centralized Planning Tools

The biggest development towards effective storycentric workflows, according to vendors, has been the creation of centralized planning tools that allow broadcast and digital teams within a station or network (or different production teams across multiple sites) to get a clear picture of what everyone is working on.

AP, whose ENPS newsroom system is used by big groups including Nexstar and Tegna, introduced its Playbook planning system back in 2018. The cloud-based system is designed to handle multiplatform, enterprise-level editorial planning and is accessible from any web browser as well as a Playbook mobile app. It works with ENPS as well as third-party NRCS’s and allows broadcast and digital journalists to plan stories, monitor assignments and even track coverage expenses.

Brian Doyle

“That was the most logical step to bringing parts of the newsroom together into a single system around planning,” says Brian Doyle, AP’s director of product management. “Regardless of the various outlets that you may be looking to push for a story, whether that be for your social or digital teams or for broadcast, they can at least unify in a single system around planning. Because the systems being used to publish to those different sites are so different between those teams.”

A new capability AP has added to ENPS is a module aimed at digital distribution called Cast. AP Cast will take stories created and planned in Playbook, Doyle says, and move them to a seamless user interface that is capable of ordering and then publishing them to third-party systems via an API. The most common applications for Cast are for building newsletters or communicating story placeholders to a CMS for posting online.

Dave Colantuoni

Avid has been a longtime competitor to AP’s ENPS with its legacy iNews product. iNews has now been replaced by MediaCentral | Newsroom Management, a module within Avid’s broader MediaCentral content production platform. Avid has “absolutely seen that shift” to a storycentric, “digital-first” approach among its customers, says Dave Colantuoni, VP of product management for Avid, and has responded with a new planning tool called MediaCentral | Collaborate.

With MediaCentral | Collaborate, he says, the story is the “seed” for both digital and linear workflows, where customers today often deliver breaking news in near-real-time to digital and then prepare a different version for the 5 p.m. newscast.

“It’s one interface that allows multiple teams to not have multiple logins [to different systems]; to have assignment, planning, calendarization, the ability to write scripts and collaborate on them with multiple team members; to use things like notifications when things are changed; and to assemble a story within a user interface,” Colantuoni says.

Substituting For Face-To-Face

Jenn Jarvis

Jenn Jarvis, product manager, editorial workflow for Ross Video, knew that planning was a “huge blind spot” in newsrooms from her experience working as a reporter and newsroom manager. She pushed for a planning tool to be added to Ross’ Inception NRCS a decade ago. Since then, that planning capability has evolved into a new tool called Assignment Manager. Ross has made planning a focus of its software development over the past 18 months, adding better filtering and content search tools so journalists can more easily prioritize their work.

“If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that you can’t always rely on that face-to-face communication, and that’s where the importance of having a centralized tool comes in,” Jarvis says. “Because if your digital team is using completely separate planning tools from your broadcast team, then if they’re not physically sitting together and getting to talk to each other face to face, they’re not going to accidently run into each other to share information in their day-to-day work tools either.”

Jarvis has seen newsrooms in the past where the digital teams and broadcast teams were using separate planning tools and sitting in separate spaces and wound up each sending their own camera crews to the same event. While sending different reporters might make sense, she says, capturing the same raw material twice simply doesn’t.

“Even if the digital team has distinct tools for some of their more complex functions for publishing or analytics, having a shared planning tool is absolutely crucial to reducing duplication of effort, to having visibility of all the resources you have at your disposal, and telling a complete story across all of their platforms,” Jarvis says.

Tapping The Cloud For New Functionality

A longtime proponent of the storycentric approach is Dalet, whose Galaxy NRSC system is used by the NBC Universal-owned stations, the ABC O&Os and Fox News. Dalet is now evolving its newsroom offerings with Pyramid, a new range of cloud-and web-based production applications, or “modules,” that are designed to interface with legacy Galaxy systems to provide additional functionality and “ease the transition of the newsroom to the cloud,” says Mathieu Zarouk, Dalet director of product marketing.

Mathieu Zarouk

The first Pyramid module or “extension” is Centralized Planning, a modern container-based planning tool that can be connected to one Galaxy newsroom, or several systems to consolidate multiple stations on enterprise-wide planning. Centralized Planning serves as a container where teams can share multiple aspects of stories, including source materials, finished material, different titles and different scripts.

Other Pyramid extensions include a web-based video editor and an automated distribution tool for sending stories to digital platforms like YouTube. Zarouk notes that content distributed to a digital platform may not only have different graphics but could also be presented in a different aspect ratio, and those differences are originally laid out in Centralized Planning.

“We see that trend where a story is not just a TV script anymore, but it’s one TV story and many versions of a digital story,” he says. “They want to tell stories to multiple audiences on different screens and in different formats, and they need to adapt content depending on its destination. It’s not just distributing to multiple endpoints but also adapting it to make it relevant for the platform and also the audience on that platform.”

AP Cast

Another company using the cloud to evolve its legacy products is graphics, automation and asset management vendor Vizrt, which has created Story, a Web-based system initially aimed at online and social media production. While Vizrt doesn’t make its own NRCS or CMS, Story has some of the functionality of both including script creation and editing. It also tightly integrates with the Viz One media asset management system and Viz Pilot template-based graphics system. Customers include 24-hour news channel Al Hadath in Dubai, which has used it to create both digital and broadcast content, and Newsday Media Group in the U.S.

Story is easy to use, and its editing functions can be mastered by most journalists in under an hour, says Jakob Rosinski, Vizrt VP of product management. But the unique selling proposition for the product is its ability to work with Vizrt’s template-based graphics, allowing a journalist to create a graphic once and then use it over and over again many times. Story also supports the use of metadata-based graphics, or “metagraphics,” that can be automatically generated based on third-party data sources such as providers of sports scores or election results. TV4 in Sweden is producing all of its hockey highlights with Story in this manner.

Ross Assignment Manager

Instead of using a compositor to “burn in” graphics into the video that is then played out, metagraphics allow the video asset to be stored separately from a graphic that is only rendered upon playout. This makes last-minute changes or corrections very easy to make, Rosinski says.

“Some of our clients are producing very different language versions of the same content,” Rosinski says. “They are just reusing the asset along with the meta-graphics and then they’re creating new language versions. And the whole time it’s on a very, very fast pace.”

The Rundown Remains

While the pace of digital news production has taken off, one thing vendors agreed on is that the traditional rundown isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. A particular reason to keep the rundown is that the MOS (Media Object Server) protocol works so well to provide integration between NRCS’s and broadcast systems like servers and graphics, allowing production automation systems like Ross OverDrive and Grass Valley Ignite to cut down on the number of people required for a linear newscast.

But with the storycentric, digital-first mindset, vendors and broadcasters are looking at it in a new light.

“We have some customers that still depend on that rundown-based way of creating stories or planning out their day,” Colantuoni says. “But really a lot more customers are focusing on the story as the beginning, story as the center. So, the rundown is a little less important to them when planning out their day and assigning tasks.”

“The rundown is really just a distribution endpoint, if you think about it,” Jarvis adds. “It may be the birthplace of the NRCS and the original purpose, but the rundown is just one of many distribution endpoints that we have. A lot of content being created may not ever show up in a rundown.”

The post Broadcasters Inch Closer To Storycentric News Production appeared first on TV News Check.

Metadata serves a number of functions in broadcast workflows, including making video findable and searchable, tracking rights data and automating parts of the workflow. One of the major challenges is that manually entering metadata can result in a hodgepodge of terms or inconsistent results, so automatically tagging content through artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming more common.

Understanding the critical role of metadata in media workflows, vendors offer different ways to add and use metadata and ways to help broadcasters find those valuable clips, or needles in their haystacks of archives.

Tedial’s smartWork NoCode media integration platform

Tedial CEO Julian Fernandez-Campon identifies three categories of metadata. The first is the content metadata, which describes the content itself. The second is the strata, or the timeline and layers in a clip, such as marking a point in a video as a touchdown or violent. And the third is the technical metadata, which relates to the standards and types of video and audio content, such as whether it is UHD.

Tracking Data Through The Supply Chain

That technical piece will likely only become more important as broadcasters focus on combatting deep fakes.

Raoul Cospen, director of business development for EMEA/APAC at Dalet, says the company is working on a feature for Pyramid that will be able to use metadata to track the origin of media to prevent fake news.

Once the capability is available, he says, “news organizations can, through Dalet Pyramid, authenticate their media before it’s getting distributed and the other way around. When we import media, we can see whether the media has been authenticated or not.”

Debra Slater, founder of Three Media, says part of technical data keeps track of the media’s movement through the supply chain. The audit trail is going to become even more important over time as more people collaborate on content, she says.

But what’s in the clip is usually what broadcasters are looking for, and artificial intelligence (AI) is helping with recognition of content and turning that information into metadata associated with the media. Such systems can determine faces, places, logos and more.

“All of that information is going to give a wealth of information to content providers,” Slater says.

And that visual data makes it possible for broadcasters to find one clip among thousands of clips in the archives.

Russell Vijayan, director of product at Digital Nirvana, says, “today, archives are unreadable. It’s a pain to get content from archives.”

Unlocking Content’s ‘Massive Value’

Ed Hauber, director of business development at Digital Nirvana, says AI can comb through archival data and generate information about “what year this took place, where it took place, identify faces and names, and other things that technology can extract can then be generated and indexed back to those assets.”

Dalet Pyramid’s planner showcases different story angles and versions for different platforms, a mediabin with the collection of raw material, projects and finished material, work orders and other collaboration objects and their metadata.

But combining transcripts of video with visual intelligence makes content much more easily findable, he says.

Ben Howell, Veritone’s senior director of product management, says applying cognitive data to content “just opens up all these new doors,” making it possible to search for things like faces or happy birthday and receive useful results.

“The AI piece of it is so critical, so important. Not enough people take advantage of the capabilities of it, and when they do, they see so much return on it,” he says.

Steinar Søreide, CTO at Mjoll, Fonn Group, says broadcasters are also relying on metadata to handle licensing and usage rights information for clips.

“They can automate and control where can you publish it,” he says.

Grass Valley Chief Software Architect James Cain says metadata makes content more valuable than un-tagged content. Without it, there’s no provenance for the video so broadcasters don’t know if they can use it, he says.

In short, he says, content has value before metadata is applied, but “massive value” after metadata is applied.

“Metadata is part of a bigger piece. It can make me more efficient, but it makes my whole company more efficient. It is the bedrock on which you can build your workflow,” Cain says.

Metadata’s Challenges

Metadata presents a few challenges, including ensuring the right information is captured, how information is input, the classification system that is used, what happens when pieces of unstandardized metadata live in the same system and how metadata integrates with multiple systems.

Matt Gardner, VIDA’s director of customer success at Visual Data, says “everybody wants metadata, but nobody wants to add metadata.”

Some systems even require metadata to be added before allowing users to proceed to the next step.

“People may start putting in gibberish or some words to be allowed to continue,” Søreide says.

Three Media’s XEN:Pipeline, a cloud based supply-chain workflow management platform, usies customer supplied and workflow and process audit metadata to identify resource bottlenecks.

Because adding metadata to assets manually is laborious and expensive, automatically generated metadata is one sought after solution.

But vendors say planning needs to happen before an entire archive gets tagged to ensure the best metadata results.

“If you don’t have the right metadata to start, it’s going to hurt you throughout the life cycle of your asset,” Gardner says.

Mjoll’s Mimir shows automated metadata via face detection, with people’s names under the video, as well as via a clickable transcript, making it possible to jump to the position of the clip where that word is spoken.

Metadata generated by different systems may follow different standards or may not be usable on a different platform.

Fernandez-Campon says metadata needs to be merged or normalized so it can be accessed. Tedial’s smartWork platform does that, he says.

Metadata Hygiene

Lacie Romano, Visual Data’s VP of global marketing, says one barrier clients often face in migrating their libraries to the cloud is the hygiene of their metadata, in that there are multiple types of metadata involved with “messy libraries.”

But systems like Visual Data’s VIDA simplifies that migration and cleans up that metadata, she adds.

EditShare CTO Stephen Tallamy says another concern is metadata getting lost as it moves through the workflow. This can be related to how different systems handle metadata and often results in the “lowest common denominator of what” metadata each system can contain, he says.

“It’s the classic cutting floor issue,” he says. “All that metadata was there until it wasn’t.”

In short, broadcasters can be at the “mercy of the lowest common denominator and the vendor’s interpretation of the lowest common denominator” for metadata handling, he says.

Driving The Workflow

The EditShare Flow media asset management system works at a deep integration level with applications like Media Composer and Adobe so there is “more ability for that metadata to power the workflow,” he says. “It’s all very well to have that metadata, but what’s the point of it? To dive the workflow.”

Grass Valley’s AMPP Asset Management uses AI to transcribe audio. Storyboards can then be created quickly by highlighting key parts of the transcript.

Metadata is key for Dalet’s Storytelling 360 workflow, Cospen says. It helps broadcasters manage different versions of stories for different platforms as well as helping track content that is owned and produced out of it. It tracks edited videos and projects and references who is involved with different projects and when content is due, he says.

Archiving On Ingest

Automated workflows can harness AI for metadata at the very earliest stages of the content creation process.

Skip Levans, Quantum’s marketing director of media and entertainment, says sometimes broadcasters find it hard to just keep up with their immediate needs for content, so the notion of archiving content on ingest is gaining traction.

In short, content is tagged on the fly as it enters the asset management system.

“Ingesting with a batch of tags dramatically speeds up production without potentially throwing away something you’ll want later,” Levans says.

VIDA’s deep metadata search with natural language.

While other metadata can be added later, “passing through the fingertips is the 80% solution,” he adds. After all, “only two minutes of it is going to make it into the package, but the rest of it is only going to make killer B roll. If you can find it.”

Craig Bury, partner and CTO at Three Media, says the costs for using AI are going to decrease, and confidence in accuracy will continue to increase. In the earliest days of using AI for generating metadata, he says, accuracy would “vary wildly” from a small percentage of confidence to 90% and better.

Advances in AI technology translate to much higher quality of metadata, he says.

Garner says it takes time and planning to tag large libraries with metadata, even with AI.

“There’s no magic wand,” he says. “To get it right, you have to spend the time.”

Unlocking Content Value

Levans says it’s worth it.

He says operations without coherent metadata are dogpaddling to keep their heads above water compared to the efficient swimming done by a broadcaster who’s on point with the metadata game.

One of Quantum’s customers “got so good at implementing a metadata plan for all the content they had going back to the 1940s” that adding metadata “became not a chore but a critical way to gain leverage on their content,” he says.

As the racing customer’s library got bigger and better organized, the library became more valuable, Levans says.

“It’s not a linear scale thing. It becomes almost exponentially more valuable,” he says. It unlocks more things you can do, especially when you start to monetize.”

The post Mining Content’s ‘Massive Value’ With Metadata appeared first on TV News Check.

The latest Dalet Flex release adds new tools and language support that enable customers to manage, create and deliver content with even greater efficiency starting from the moment they capture content. It also adheres to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines’ principles, making it easier for everyone, including those with disabilities, to collaborate on projects with greater ease.

“Dalet Flex continues to deliver immense value with capabilities that make our customers nimbler and more inclusive,” said Mathieu Zarouk, Dalet director of product marketing. “We are making it easier for everyone to use Dalet Flex from the moment the content is captured through the time it’s distributed, monetized and archived. The camera card management, deep integration with tools like Adobe Premiere Pro® along with key accessibility design and language support, makes Dalet Flex the industry’s most robust, cloud-native media management, production and delivery platform on the market.”

Dalet Flex can be deployed in the cloud or on-premises. It can be hosted by Dalet or the customer as a dedicated, single-tenant implementation. Dalet Flex for teams, Dalet’s multi-tenanted SaaS solution, is hosted and managed by Dalet.

New Dalet Flex capabilities that are available today include:

Greater Accessibility — The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines were developed in cooperation with individuals and organizations from around the world, with the goal of providing a single shared standard for web content accessibility. Dalet Flex is being adapted to meet the guideline’s principles of perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. The improvements range from color adjustments for greater contrasts to aria labels identifying interactive elements of the page, to reorganizing HTML elements and styles so common items like checkboxes are easier to work with.

Expanded Language Support — Users can seamlessly switch the Dalet Flex interface between languages, making it easier for customers to support multilingual workforces. Customers requiring other language support should contact their Dalet representative for assistance.

Camera Data Wrangling — Integrated with Dalet AmberFin, Dalet Flex features advanced camera card and spanned clip management, providing a more efficient and natural management of content coming from camera cards. Users can archive or restore an entire card in a single operation. Dalet AmberFin and Dalet Flex let users browse card assets and, for spanned media, capture basic information about each underlying file. The ability to manage camera card data will enable users in the field or on-set to make content available to colleagues in a more efficient and organized manner.

Dalet Flex also serves as the foundation for Dalet Flex for teams, a multi-tenanted, packaged SaaS offering for smaller workgroups and specific workflows. Dalet Flex for teams democratizes key media logistics use cases, such as library management and multiplatform content distribution, through affordable, pre-configured workflows fully hosted and managed by Dalet.

These configurations allow customers to manage rich, multimedia content libraries; automate content distribution across traditional, digital and social platforms; support a hybrid or remote workforce, and/or build a living archive.

The post Dalet Flex Takes A Leap Forward In Accessibility And Production Workflows appeared first on TV News Check.

Whether it’s for a work in progress or finished media, broadcasters are calling on a combination of cloud, software and transport technologies to facilitate collaborating and sharing at a station or across groups. And as much as the technology has improved, some challenges remain.

There are a number of reasons broadcasters want the ability to enable teams to work remotely yet collaboratively. Even before COVID-19 sent nearly everyone into work-from-home frameworks, broadcasters were looking for ways to streamline workflows through remote operations.

Putting Tools Into High Gear

As Eric Bolton, Zixi’s VP of business development, puts it, “pre-pandemic, these things were very much all underway. Because of the pandemic what we saw was ‘in case of emergency please break glass’” and all the collaboration tools available “got put onto high gear when people couldn’t go onto premises.”

One of those early steps was technology that allowed journalists to quickly work on stories in the field so they could avoid the drive back to the station.

Back then, Samuel Peterson, Bitcentral COO and GM of its News Production business unit, recalls, journalists would “drive down to the local Starbucks and get on their Wi-Fi to contribute remotely” and push that content to the station.

Now, says Robert Millis, product manager for IBM’s MaxCloud, there is so much power in the latest handheld tablets and mobile devices that journalists can work in the field.

“Just grab the laptop and go, and yet that’s all I need,” he says.

And journalists in the field can be supported by teams back at the station — or in other stations across the country.

Millis says some of The Weather Company’s customers have stations all across the nation that take advantage of cloud and sharing technology so people working different schedules and shifts can complement each other.

“Some follow the sun from the East Coast to the West Coast,” he says.

Or regional meteorology teams might complete their local content and then support national weather hits “without ever leaving the place they work,” he adds.

More Crowding Into Cloud

Taking that a step further, sharing through the cloud can help disaster recovery should a weather event take a station offline, he says.

“Maybe they can’t even get into the building,” Millis says. “But if they’re on the cloud, their content is protected and available, even if the people who would normally use that content and drive those shows can’t even get into their building.”

Using the cloud opens up many different workflows, allowing greater productivity without adding “a ton more people,” Millis says. Putting content in the cloud breaks down physical location silos, allowing people in different places to collaborate, he says.

And that capability has improved as data transmission technologies have advanced. “We have a lot of people in the cloud, and more are coming in every day,” Millis says.

The Weather Company’s Max Cloud “connects parts of an enterprise that may be way across the country and helps them work as … a tight knit team,” Millis says.

The Weather Company’s Max Cloud landing page.

The platform has been on air with customers for more than a year and a half, he says.

Enabling Transparency, Rights Management

A hallmark of the AP’s ENPS system has always been transparency and the ability to share content easily between users or different stations, according to Brian Doyle, AP’s director of product management.

Users are “able to take that story from their rundown and drag it to any other rundown in the enterprise,” he says. However, he adds, sometimes rights management can be an issue when sharing content with stations, as in some states different affiliates may not be able to run certain content.

Rights management is “a key element in the workflow that we’ve been trying to work with customers on,” he says.

The AP Playbook app helps teams like the Voice of America, which has been using Playbook for a few years, keep track of what content is in progress to help ensure efficient coverage in different regions, Doyle says.

“Playbook is crucial to their day-to-day workflow,” he says. It shows “what’s being done on Ukraine for the day, the week, the month; what stories are being covered for COVID, what’s Africa doing for COVID, the Latin America angle on COVID. They can see all that in one location to understand the full scope of what’s being covered.”

Breaking TV And Digital Barriers In News Sharing

Dalet Pyramid uses “a planner approach with an intuitive interface” to allow broadcast and digital teams to use the same system, giving both teams visibility into planned stories, Luis Fernandez, senior product marketing manager at Dalet, says. This allows broadcasters to maximize resources instead of having multiple teams covering the same story, he says.

“We created a workflow that would allow newsrooms to go as linear and digital-first as they are ready for,” he says. Dalet Pyramid “allows you to not duplicate, not overwork, but maximize resources.”

The solution is intended to break the barriers around television and digital, he says.

“It’s the story that matters,” Fernandez says. “The different platforms, television, social media, OTT, are just ways to create the content for that specific audience.”

Dalet Pyramid is a web-based, all cloud-native solution that lets teams see what packages are planned locally and in other facilities, he says. Stations can access content from other locations and repurpose it for their own use, he adds.

Tearing Down The Walls

Bitcentral has seen more combining of content from the field and content in the station over the last two years than ever before, Peterson says. And customers were increasingly asking for ways to carry out more activities — like more sophisticated editing — from the field, he says.

In essence, “maybe not make the walls transparent but maybe tear down the walls so they’re not there at all,” he says, so everything is more accessible and powerful even without great bandwidth. The goal, he says is “to make sure it works the same for someone in the station and in the field.”

Bitcentral’s Oasis also lets customers like Hearst, Tegna, Gray, Fox and others share finished assets.

Users can search for keywords, categories and content in rundowns across all the stations in a group connected through the Oasis Sharing tool.

“Sharing took off in a way that I don’t think we understood,” Peterson says. “People were all grappling with how do we produce news and produce it fast enough when no one can be in the station. We saw those number shoot through the roof.”

And those numbers are still easily 50% higher now than they were pre-pandemic, he says. Before the pandemic, Peterson says, there was less need to share, but there also may not have been the understanding that this was possible.

“They never had to go use it, and so they weren’t fully aware of the power of it, and once they got a taste of it, they were, ‘Oh there’s a lot of really great content being created across the group’” and they are choosing to incorporate that content into their own rundowns, Peterson says.

No More Hiccups

TVU Producer, a cloud-based solution that facilitates remote production, was created before COVID-19 made remote work a necessity, TVU Networks CEO Paul Shen says.

“We created TVU Producer … because traveling is expensive,” he says. “If people are sitting at home, they can effectively cover multiple games a day.”

TVU Networks’ TVU Producer

And while TVU Producer wasn’t created to facilitate remote production in the time of COVID-19, Fox did use it for its Coronavirusnow.com OTT channel, which later became livenowfox.com, he says.

It also helps broadcasters promote collaboration across teams, Shen says. This is important as the industry moves to improve efficiency of their teams and resources without incurring costs associated with travel, he says.

“In the past, technology was not good enough to support what we can do. Now, today we have major events use our product without hiccups,” Shen says.

A ‘Virtual Production Booth’

Broadcasters had been relying on tools like Zoom and Teams to obtain video of people due to the pandemic’s social distancing needs.

LiveU’s Air Control connects people by video from remote events, Arco Groenenberg, LiveU’s director of sales for the central region, says, allowing broadcasters to remotely bring in guests and take advantage of a remote green room.

“It almost creates a virtual production booth,” he says.

LiveU’s Matrix is like a router in the cloud that makes sharing content easier, Groenenberg says. “Sinclair, CBS, Fox-owned-and-operated, NBC — they’re all on this platform to share content between their television stations,” he says. “If they have a breaking story in Cincinnati and they want to share it, they can throw it into this platform and other people can see it.”

Using the LiveU Matrix Dynamic Share service, producers can define their live feed’s destination ad-hoc, via the Global Directory.

Matrix is also used for pool content, such as the Denver helicopter feed during the Derek Chauvin trial, he says.

Behind much of the content moving around the industry is the cloud-native Zixi software platform, which supports 17 protocols. Zixi has 350 technology partners, including Panasonic, and has been in the original equipment manufacturing level for over a decade.

“The sharing of news and stories has been hyperbolic,” Zixi’s Bolton says.

And he expects 5G to impact sharing as it will make it possible to “grab signals” where it may not have been feasible in the past.

Improved Connectivity

Connectivity where signals are iffy is critical for journalists out in the field. Dejero’s connectivity technology has improved since COVID started, Rob Waters, director of global sales for Dejero, says.

The company’s latest EnGo 265 GateWay uses smart blending technology “to create one huge internet connection,” he says.

The GateWay makes it possible to “research on the move, transfer large files, and access MAM systems from remote locations,” Waters says. “It allows them to tell better stories. They’re not constrained by whatever connection they’ve got available.”

One EnGo customer in Australia uses it as a mobile transmitter for a weekly live three-way conversation between two remotely located experts and an anchor at Channel 7 for a program called Sunrise, he says.

Channel 7’s Sunrise program uses the Dejero EnGo for remote location shooting in Australia.

The unintended consequence of making it so easy for field crews to remain in the field is that content they capture on SD cards never get to the station because the SD cameras never get to the station, Peterson says.

“There’s just a pace at which we’re all working today,” he says.

In the past, field crews tended to pause long enough to ensure all content was ingested and filed at the station, he says.

It’s a problem Bitcentral is working to solve for customers, including Hearst. The potential solution is in proof of concept right now.

“We need to make sure that content’s not lost to us,” he says. “We’re trying to balance between efficiency and long-term value.”

The post News Sharing And Collaboration Is Getting Easier And Smarter appeared first on TV News Check.

The subscription-based implementation of Dalet’s cloud-native media logistics, which was done in collaboration with partner Telstra Broadcast Services, enables AFL to tackle a large-scale technical uplift of its rich game content stored on 22,000 physical tapes and reimagine the way they share and resell the high-value game content.

“As custodians of the history of the game, it’s really important that we provide a simple way for future generations to access and experience the game’s rich history,” said Spencer Wilson, AFL operations and broadcast manager. “Dalet Flex provides a single source of truth for this mammoth archive. You can use Dalet Flex to search the archives, pull content and package it for monetization for any type of sales channel. The core design of the system tracks not only media assets but manages commercial agreements, compliance requirements and transactions tied to those assets. This allows us to set up an on-demand service that radically changes how we can share with our broadcast customers and fans.”

As the governing body of the professional Australian rules football, AFL is the guardian of the league’s video archives, preserving historical game content for its club members since the very first game captured on film in 1909. Concerned with degradation and loss of valuable assets and the growing storage requirements for each of the 400 plus games shot in progressive formats, the organization sought to digitally preserve its entire archive.

The AFL used Telstra Purple to configure the Amazon Web Services data servers and data centers that stored the digitized game content and Dalet Flex to facilitate key media logistics functions including archival searches, retrievals, and packaging of content for on-demand and multi-platform distribution. The new on-demand media request workflow enables AFL to significantly expand the use of historical game content and deepen fan engagement from discovery of favorite club heroes of the past to the history of the game.

The AFL archive project comes on the heels of several high-profile sports transformations including Lega Serie A, the National Rugby League of Australia, Arsenal Football Club and the Ligue de Football Professionnel, all of which implemented Dalet solutions to drive new video strategies to expand their multigenerational fan engagement across digital channels.

Ren Middleton, Dalet regional sales manager ANZ, said: “For years, AFL has been producing content and delivering to their fans all ‘for the love of the Game.’ They are leveraging Dalet Flex to enhance their video strategy, and transform from a sport organization that oversees an archive to a media-savvy sport organization that utilizes technology to optimize their high-value content. Innovative on demand and digital video strategies take experience and understanding. We are able to bring all of our best practices delivering video solutions to a number of iconic leagues and teams, and deliver faster, more efficient, more impactful workflow solutions like AFL on-demand archive.”

The post Dalet Helps Australian Football League Protect, Monetize And Share Its Rich Game Heritage appeared first on TV News Check.

Proven, pre-configured workflows such as “Library Management” and “Multiplatform Content Distribution” let customers manage rich, multimedia content libraries; automate content distribution across traditional, digital, and social platforms; support a hybrid or remote workforce, and/or build a living archive. With the elasticity of the cloud at their fingertips, customers can quickly scale resources as needed with full control over budgets.

“Today’s creative and digital media teams want feature-rich tools in an affordable, easy to consume and to deploy offering. They want minimal overhead and flexibility to manage the fluid movement of resources whether they are working remotely or in the office, or continually onboarding and offboarding,” said Mathieu Zarouk, Director of Product Strategy, Media Workflows, Dalet. “Dalet Flex has been cloud-native from day one, providing a strong foundation for our multi-tenanted SaaS offering. Key workflows like library management and content distribution were conceived with cloud operations in mind, and perfected through customer feedback and success allowing us to bring these solutions packaged for fast deployment and easy adoption, to a wider audience.”

Available on a subscription basis with three plans — Essentials, Growth and Advanced — Dalet Flex for Teams brings all the convenience and affordability SaaS has to offer in an agile media logistics solution designed to support the fluid ebb and flow of creative collaboration. Dalet Flex for Teams, which runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and is designed with Dalet’s approach to security in mind, can be up and running within one business day.

Customers simply log in via the easy-to-use web client to access Dalet Flex tools and workflows. The pre-configured environments are delivered with ready-to-execute workflows such as import /export, review and approval, and distribution. Dalet Flex for Teams’ capabilities will be updated regularly through controlled maintenance releases, bringing new features based on customer inputs and feedback.

Dalet Flex for Teams provides metadata and asset management sophistication while reducing set-up complexity

Secure auto-scaling and load balancing ensure high availability and resilience, removing the need for the client to deploy their own infrastructure or manage overhead. With the infrastructure complexity and costs managed by Dalet, users can fully focus on their craft, creating amazing content and meeting their audience’s needs, while enjoying a much lower cost of entry.

“The launch of Dalet Flex for Teams marks a significant milestone in the evolution of Dalet’s product lineup and our business model,” said Robin Kirchhoffer, Dalet senior director of product marketing. “Over the past three years, we have significantly expanded our customer success resources and shifted our focus towards cloud-native, subscription-based media workflow solutions. The introduction of our multi-tenanted media logistics solution is the culmination of our efforts to bring the power of Dalet Flex in the hands of new users and teams.”

Dalet Flex continues to be offered as an enterprise-grade media workflow platform available as a subscription, with custom offerings that can be tailored exactly to any organization’s needs and specific requirements. Dalet Flex can be hosted by customers, in the cloud or on-premises, or by Dalet as a dedicated, single-tenant implementation.

Dalet will also showcase Dalet Flex at 2022 NAB Show (April 23-27 in Las Vegas) at booth 4423 in Central Hall. Attendees can book a private demonstration here.

The post NAB Show: Dalet Launches Dalet Flex For Teams appeared first on TV News Check.

Based in Lima, Peru, América Televisión offers a wide range of programming from thematic talk shows, to reality programming and general news. Also based in Lima, the Canal N channel is focused on country-wide news, current affairs, and political programs.

After decades of running the two news operations with separate editorial and archive processes, the group took the transformative step to consolidate the old, siloed media infrastructure under a new Dalet solution, bringing continuity to content management and news story development. The dual-channel operational upgrade, which was led by Dalet channel partner Connect Media, included the installation of an enterprise editorial solution that provided a centralized repository to manage news wires and content, with tools to facilitate news story planning, editing, graphics, and publishing.

Dalet’s story-centric approach builds the story around media assets, enabling better story evolution and content transparency and access across the two newsrooms whose missions leverage the same content for different program outcomes.

“Dalet’s news solution is designed for the way our journalists, editors, news directors, graphics, camera teams want to work,” says Javier Vásquez Mendoza, América Televisión head of engineer support and operations. “It is all interconnected. The centralized access to content makes it easier to evolve the story whether we are in the newsroom, in the field, or working from home as many journalists had to during pandemic restrictions.

“Dalet’s web-based tools make it easy to connect from anywhere at any point in the workflow. It’s designed to support our hybrid workflow with greater transparency into how we are using the content.”

Dalet’s Unified News Operations solution allows both America Televisión and Canal N to manage story development and production for on-air and web content. Dalet Brio supports 16 channels of ingest with the ability to edit late-breaking news stories as the material is being recorded onto the storage server as well as playout of all on air news packages and programs.

The underlying Dalet media asset capabilities track metadata, ensuring content is highly searchable and accessible by authorized staff on-premises and off.

Julian Decaix, Dalet general manager, Americas, said: “Dalet’s integrated newsroom and story-centric workflow enable newsrooms like América Televisión and Canal N to reimagine their entire workflow to gain more value from their content while simultaneously supporting a more dynamic remote working scenario.

“However, we bring more to the table than great news software technology. We offer over two decades of experience in news and people on the ground in Peru that can help customers transform their operations, empower their teams with new workflows and move their business forward.”

The post Dalet’s Unified News Operations Solution Powers Peru’s América Televisión and Canal N appeared first on TV News Check.

Leading the security strategy is recently-appointed chief information security officer (CISO), Jerome Athias. An expert in IT and cyber security with more than 20 years of experience, he is a data protection standards contributor who has helped numerous companies advance their security position.

Dalet is implementing a Zero Trust approach to security which will help customers ensure that every input or connection request complies with internal security policies: that they’re running on reputable platforms or that authorized agents are using them.

Athias said: “Following our heritage as an on-premises provider, we have decades of experience monitoring systems, and as workflows using external platforms and multi-connectivity have evolved, we’ve grown with them. Zero Trust will secure our customer’s borders no matter what cloud services, internet of things (IoT) and/or bring your own device (BYOD) policies are used to interact with their organization.”

The post Dalet Launches Key Security Initiatives For Moving To The Cloud appeared first on TV News Check.

Stephane Schlayen, Dalet chief operating officer, said: “Ewan is well versed in both channel development and transformation of business models from perpetual to recurring and will ensure Dalet customers have convenient access to expert guidance and a well-balanced ecosystem to expand their workflow, especially when it comes to cloud infrastructure providers.

“Having worked closely with a number of Dalet partners previously, Ewan is well suited to help Dalet rapidly expand its sales channels and support our new markets and business segments with a diverse range of outstanding technologies.”

Dalet said its partner programs “meet the ever-expanding user community’s requirements for a wider range of technology options with easy access to a top-tier sales and support network.”

The Dalet Technology Alliance Program, which boasts more than 300 integrations within the Dalet media ecosystem today, recognizes key technology applications and prioritizes the collaboration to expand customer workflow options.

Ewan Johnston, strategic alliances and channel partner director, adds: “More and more companies outside the traditional media and entertainment space need enterprise video management capabilities whether to improve the efficiency of their video production, enhance brand awareness or engage audiences at a deeper level over digital channels. Dalet’s cloud-native media workflow solutions, which are used by media companies globally, have been packaged under SaaS and subscription options, making our first-rate video management accessible to a wider range of customers. Thus, we are deepening our relationships with our current partners while simultaneously creating new ones to have a wider partner network that can support these expanded opportunities.”

The Dalet Channel Sales Partner program delivers a high-quality customer sales and service experience via the local presence of a highly knowledgeable global partner network. The multi-tiered program enables existing and new sales-centric partners to build a long-term sustainable business working with Dalet.

Ewan adds: “Beyond the normal opportunity generation, product training, and certification process you would expect in any partner program, the Dalet Channel Sales Partner program will deliver tools and best practices on the full benefits and opportunities presented by the switch to an OpEx-based model and Cloud-centric solutions. With this advanced level of support and guidance, our partners can leverage their understanding of video production management and distribution, and help users in new markets navigate the nuances and achieve maximum success.”

The post Dalet Champions New Technology Partner Alliance & Sales Channel Programs appeared first on TV News Check.

The Dalet AmberFin release features seamless integration with cloud-native Dalet Flex media logistics and Dalet Pyramid unified news operations platforms. “New transcoding capabilities that elevate the user experience along with successful completion of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Foundational Technical Review solidifies Dalet AmberFin’s cloud excellence, keeping it at the forefront of conversion innovation and the leading scalable media processing technology for preserving artistic intent,” the company said.

Patrick Devlin, product manager for Dalet AmberFin, said: “Dalet AmberFin sits at the heart of the rapidly evolving streaming workflow. Because it is a cornerstone technology for our customers, we are focused on its continuous improvement and integration in the wider ecosystem.

“This release threads the recognized Dalet AmberFin conversion quality and media processing technology across our flagship SaaS solutions, Dalet Flex and Dalet Pyramid. As a critical pillar of these solutions, Dalet AmberFin bridges the gap for Dalet customers who need a fully cloud-native media ecosystem with proven end-to-end production and distribution workflows that can support any existing or emerging market vertical.”

Excellence In Cloud

Recognizing the shift in customer agility and mobility needs, Dalet AmberFin provides a cloud-first approach that has been verified by the AWS Foundational Technical Review.

Patrick elaborated: “It is no longer sufficient to simply take an on-premises system and run it on EC2 instances in the cloud, customers want cloud-native applications that can take full advantage of containerized services, scale up and scale down and the security best practices in the cloud.”

The AWS Foundational Technical Review provides a baseline for cloud requirements and covers development, best practices and operational considerations ensuring customers have the agility and firepower they need to manage through bursts in workload with ease, yet optimize cloud costs.

Convenience, Agility and Power

Dalet AmberFin’s advanced ingest management and conversion combined with elastic cloud resources enables enterprise users to cost-effectively facilitate large-scale projects. The newly updated Dalet AmberFin Kiosk, which supports macOS and offers expanded support for formats including ProRes RAW and NEF, helps users fly through offloading and backing up mass amounts of content. Utilizing cloud storage, it concurrently verifies content integrity and enriches metadata so that content is organized and ready to drive further operational workflows easily.

This new capability is particularly useful for teams out on location for long production shoots. Processing pipeline improvements leverage Netflix Photon validation tools to enable key IMF workflows in the cloud. Other production efficiency enhancements include support for UHD input and output with a standard transcode node and support for writing ABR packages DASH & HLS while content is being ingested.

Evolution to SaaS

Dalet’s accelerated development plans progress its entire suite of cloud-native solutions in 2022. Dalet Flex will be made available as a multi-tenanted SaaS offering, providing customers with scalability and elasticity when needed while offloading the costs of infrastructure investment and time spent on maintenance to Dalet. With Dalet Pyramid, the company said, “newsrooms will be able to virtualize their entire operation with increased production and distribution capabilities that enable digital-first news story workflows anytime, anywhere.”

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Based in Bogotá, RTVC offers the latest news, educational and cultural entertainment over three terrestrial channels. Previously, RTVC had outsourced its entire news production and distribution operation to a third-party. In 2020, the government approved a project to strengthen the infrastructure, information sourcing and news production in house under RTVC’s direction and mission, giving the broadcaster full creative control over story development and distribution.

The new design and installation, which was led by noted system integrator NYL Electrónica, features capabilities to manage source materials and production including wires, news story planning and development, editing and graphics, and delivery. The underlying Dalet media asset management platform centralizes content for efficient access, while the core orchestration engine automates the story-centric workflow enabling a friction-free flow of content.

Carlos Raúl González Martínez, supervising transmission engineer, RTVC, said that, in addition to its end-to-end news solution, Dalet’s vast experience in news production was equally as important for the successful launch. “The Dalet newsroom solution has extensive capabilities that we are able to perfect into a workflow for our specific needs. We also had the support of Dalet to help us define that workflow. This was extremely important because above all for RTVC, it was Dalet’s 20 years of experience that helped create a brand-new news environment with a new team.

“Beyond the learning curve, there were many factors we needed to take into consideration as we designed the very best workflow for our editors, graphic designers and playout. Thanks to their sound guidance, we have a highly reliable and responsive platform for what we need today that will support us into the future.”

The mandate called for deployment within two months of contract. With COVID-19 restrictions still in full force, Dalet and NYL Electrónica led the launch efforts virtually, with only key elements such as on-premises installation and coaching of personnel, done on site and in person.

“Dalet is known for its end-to-end news capabilities and is used across South America by many national broadcasters. This gave us the confidence to agree to deploy under such strict conditions and even stricter timeline,” said Roman Becerra, general manager, NYL Electrónica.

Daniel Villavicencio, director of support, NYL Electrónica, added: “In addition to offering all of the required capabilities of a fully functioning newsroom, the Dalet professional services team was instrumental in getting the entire staff up to speed and on air by the deadline.”

Like in most countries, the pandemic has increased the number of people tuning into the news for the latest information not only on TV, but social networks as well in Colombia. The team at RTVC is currently testing the integrated Dalet social media module which provides content creation and distribution as well as analytics on audience engagement, helping RTVC fine tune what content audiences are looking for.

“Bringing the news operation in house gives RTVC greater control over the story they need to tell with Dalet providing them with the platform to tell it quickly on any medium. They can easily reuse content from the archives and visually brand their content in new ways,” said Julian Decaix, general manager, Americas, Dalet. “While Dalet has perfected the story-centric workflow, RTVC now has the foundation to centralize its entire production, including its digital and radio channels onto one platform, connecting all systems and centralizing assets for cross channel use.”

Martínez concluded with the outstanding ongoing support that ensures RTVC continues to have a positive experience. “We are in a long-term relationship with Dalet and I have to emphasize that the attention and the support is always there. No waiting a week for someone to respond to your call. If we have a question or something happens that we need assistance with, we can instantly get in touch with the team. The response is immediate by people who are familiar with our situation and team members. It’s the peace of mind you want in a high-pressure broadcast situation.”

The post RTVC Brings News Inhouse With Dalet appeared first on TV News Check.

But broadcasters’ steady march to public cloud technology was the biggest story in 2021 and will likely continue to be next year, driven by a focus on new direct-to-consumer businesses and a permanent shift to remote and/or distributed production methodologies. That was the takeaway from Technology Trends 2022, a TVNewsCheck virtual event that gathered top executives from the station, network, vendor and consulting fields to forecast next year’s hot tech topics.

Janet Gardner

“We’re really seeing a push to be consumer-first by the large entertainment companies,” said Janet Gardner, president of consulting firm Perspective Media Group, who cited streaming services like WarnerMedia’s HBO Max, NBC Universal’s Peacock and ViacomCBS’ various streaming businesses (which include the free Pluto TV and the subscription Paramount +).

“That drives us toward the importance of data, data as a key trend,” she said. “Capturing data has always been a huge challenge. But now we’re seeing automated metadata extraction and automated QC [quality control]. We also see trends toward the actual management of that information moving away from traditional monolithic systems, much more towards distributed services and virtualization driving our way to the cloud.”

Gardner said the increase in multiplatform delivery, including a wave of new FAST (free ad-supported streaming TV) channels, means more investment in public cloud platforms as well as a sharpened focus on data. That means tracking data through the entire lifecycle of a program asset, all the way from the metadata on the “left side” of the media supply chain to measurement data on the “righthand side,” or fulfillment at the consumer end, in order to get a full picture of what’s being consumed in which geotargeted market.

“They want to manage a full view of data and need to gather first-person data and link it back to programs and versions and elemental content,” Gardner said. “They have versions and need to link metadata with actual media elements and what’s being consumed in which geotargeted market.”

While data is obviously critical for monetizing entertainment programming, Stephane Guez, co-founder and CTO of production software vendor Dalet, sees data as having equal importance for broadcaster’s news content.

Stephane Guez

“Today each piece of media has its own lifecycle,” Guez said. “It’s not tied to a schedule or anything like that. It needs to be discovered, which can be done with our own workflows, to drive personalization, distribution and recommendation. Those are things that are outside of the traditional television realm where the audience has no choice, they’re just consuming what’s proposed. Now it’s the other way around. It’s consumer-first in every step of that process.”

Beside multiplatform delivery, the other big driver toward more software-based orchestration in the cloud is the shift to remote production and hybrid remote/on-premise work models that occurred due to the pandemic. Dalet will be launching Dalet Pyramid in 2022, a new production platform aimed at better serving remote and hybrid news production.

The cloud-native solution will have orchestrated containers and microservices designed for easy deployment in the cloud, Guez said, but will also have an architecture flexible enough so that it can be deployed in private data centers or on-premise. It will also include a web-based video editor to give journalists the “possibility to do everything from everywhere.

“Our mission is to bring the newsroom to users where they are,” Guez said. “Instead of saying you have to come to the newsroom, and this is where you are going to do your work. No — now it’s bring the UX screens of the newsroom to the users wherever they are. Which means also to focus on collaboration, because this is the difficult aspect — how do you [provide it for] people whose job is naturally a collaborative, creative effort if they’re not in the same place.”

Michael Koetter

With the sale of CNN Center in Atlanta, WarnerMedia is aggressively moving as many operations to the cloud as possible and consolidating data centers where it can’t, said Michael Koetter, SVP, production technology for WarnerMedia. It is also creating REMI-style production models where it can, even for fixed production environments. For example, CNN’s Washington bureau will have a REMI model into WarnerMedia’s Techwood campus in Atlanta.

The cloud migration includes recording of news feeds, editing, production storage and CNN’s robust 35-year video library. All of the ingest for CNN’s D.C. bureau is being recorded into AWS right now, and CNN has also moved a substantial portion of the editing (more than 100 editors) for its CNN+ digital product into the cloud. And the production team just finished its first story for CNN International fully in the cloud.

“It’s really happening, and it’s like a freight train,” Koetter said. “We’re all really excited because it’s working, and it’s working really well.”

Another focus for Koetter’s team is further evolving studio production, including both green-screen-based virtual set technology and “virtual production” that relies on high-resolution LED displays as backdrops. The Warner Bros. studio has just launched two large virtual production sets, including one at its Leavesden, U.K., complex that is being used to produce HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon. WarnerMedia has also been starting to bring virtual production technology into Major League Baseball and National Hockey League coverage on TBS and TNT, as well as CNN.

“There’s a lot of very new and really cool stuff that’s happening in the traditional studio production environment that’s really changing the way those environments work,” Koetter said.

Station owner Graham Media Group has been gradually virtualizing workflows across its stations to simplify their infrastructure, moving functions from dedicated systems to software applications running on COTS hardware. A big technology focus for the first quarter of 2022 will be starting a project to bring its archive into the cloud, said Graham VP and CTO Tony Plosz. Plosz said his focus remains on virtualization as opposed to the cloud and noted Graham will only pursue the public cloud where it makes financial sense.

Tony Plosz

“That’s our first big step from a station side into the cloud, and taking advantage of everything it has to offer,” Plosz said. “We want to be really continuing that trend [of virtualization] and evaluate other workflows that are a good fit in the cloud, see how we can scale some of the stuff CNN is doing.”

Graham’s other technology priority for 2022 is the deployment of ATSC 3.0, which Plosz said “is really going to be huge for us.”

Graham just launched 3.0 broadcasts in Houston, its third “NextGen TV” market after Detroit and Orlando. Graham isn’t a “lighthouse” station in any of those markets, but as its rollout continues, Plosz said the group hopes to fire up its own stick in 2022 and “start to learn firsthand as a broadcaster really what all of the 3.0 capabilities are.” He added that Graham’s digital team has been working hard with the Pearl consortium to develop a polished ATSC 3.0 consumer app for NextGen TV sets that it is looking forward to unveiling.

“As we go forward into 2022, I think you’ll start to see broadcasters and vendors unpack the standard a little bit more,” Plosz said. “There’s a lot in there, a ton of things we haven’t even scratched the surface of yet.”

The post Tech Trends For ’22: Cloud Still Looms Above All appeared first on TV News Check.

Dalet says its cloud-native media logistics platform, Dalet Flex, provides Videocraft’s customers flexible remote workflows and new monetization opportunities with digital outlets. The easy-to-use production and distribution tools empower brands to better manage, package and repurpose their content during and after broadcast for increased return-on-investment.

The first installation as a result of this partnership will be with Videocraft customer, the Victoria Racing Club, which will use the Dalet Flex media logistics subscription service to integrate a number of complex broadcast systems and warehouse, prepare and reuse content for live and post-event short and long-form programming.

“Videocraft clients are looking to create more personalized content that engages their audiences and fans on a deeper level and on the platform of their choice,” says James Taylor, CEO, Videocraft. “That goal could encompass distributing to a platform that might not be readily available today and leveraging deep archives to create historically-rich, compelling stories that resonate with viewers and fans. The media management layer is a critical factor in ensuring that your content, including your deep archives, are accessible and that distribution can adapt to the changing tides. Dalet is the leader in media logistics, production, and distribution, with solutions like the cloud-native Dalet Flex. Through our partnership, we can help our clients simplify and simultaneously power complex content chains, enabling them to grow their brand right alongside their digital and content business.”

“Expanded use of content across traditional, digital and social platforms to engage audiences and fans on a deeper level has brought clientele seeking far more flexible and simpler ways to capture, curate, create and redistribute their valuable content,” says Ren Middleton, Dalet sales manager, Australia and New Zealand. “Dalet Flex sits at the center of the content supply chain with the sole purpose of simplifying the complex transactions from system to system, enabling staff to easily search, use and custom package content targeted for multi-generation audiences over any platform.”

Dalet says: “With decades of industry experience delivering scalable content supply chains, Dalet and Videocraft together can offer customers subscription-based offerings, like Dalet Flex. Dalet Flex centralizes disparate production, distribution and archiving processes into a configurable content workflow that drastically simplifies how users manage, package and distribute content. Advanced metadata and analytics capabilities, underpinned by an asset management layer and orchestration engine, provide a single source of truth for media assets across the entire media supply chain.”

In addition to Dalet Flex, Videocraft will have access to the full suite of Dalet solutions including, Dalet Pyramid for news production, Dalet Galaxy five enterprise media management and orchestration, Dalet AmberFin media processing and transcoding, and the high availability, IP-ready Dalet Brio I/O platform.

The post Dalet Partners With Australian System Integrator Videocraft appeared first on TV News Check.

Internet protocol (IP) workflows may not make sense for every part of the media supply chain. But where they do, broadcasters embracing IP gain access to a host of benefits, whether they are IP-only or use a hybrid IP-SDI approach to smooth the transition. When considering the switch, costs, security, latency and interoperability are concerns.

So is the labor force because the newer technology is not as straightforward as traditional Serial Digital Interface (SDI) technology, so different skills sets are necessary for set up and maintenance of the network. It’s also much more complex, so interoperability of components is a key concern. But IP workflows will get easier as they evolve.

Interoperability of components, such as Grass Valley’s LDX 150 camera, is a major part of IP workflows.

ASG President Dave Van Hoy says IP workflows are not appropriate for every workflow, and they may not necessarily be cost effective.

“There are places where IP is solving some problems that we couldn’t solve with SDI in any reasonable way,” Van Hoy says. Pointing to the need for cloud workflows during the pandemic, he says, “That intrinsically has to be IP.”

IP itself is a basic requirement for remote workflows, notes Marco Lopez, GM for live production products at Grass Valley.

“IP is really the on ramp to the cloud. Without IP, you can’t get effectively to the cloud,” Lopez says.

But, Van Hoy says, IP is also more complicated to set up and maintain, and broadcast engineers have less experience with IP workflows. “This is the story of the IP transition in general, figuring out where and when it’s appropriate to apply it.”

Benefits For Larger Broadcasters

In general, he says, it appears IP-based technology offers bigger gains for broadcasters who are larger than those who are smaller. For example, the gain for NBC around covering the Olympics with IP workflows is more than that for a small, single station where the only local production is the news.

“The potential gain is much smaller, yet the level of complexity to deploy it is pretty similar,” Van Hoy says.

But when it does make sense, says Karl Paulsen, chief technology officer at Diversified, it can generate benefits for the broadcaster.

For instance, he says, in the past, larger organizations may have had the same hardware present in multiple locations, each with 25%-30% utilization, but moving workflows to the cloud eliminates all the hardware.

Not only does the cloud aspect make remote work possible, but it can also speed up workflows, Paulsen says. For example, closed captioning or American Sign Language can be added to content “almost in concert with the media assembly” instead of taking days to happen.

“It takes this IP concept in order to make that [happen],” Paulsen says.

One benefit of IP workflows is efficiencies, which broadcasters experienced during the pandemic, says Julian Fernandez Campon, Tedial CTO. “They need to be able to produce more content with the same people,” he says.

Customers expanded their systems to work remotely during the pandemic, taking advantage of IP workflows and working in the cloud.

The Cost Factor

Companies considering a move to or actually making the move to IP workflows consider a number of major potential issues, including that of cost.

Bea Alonso, chief market officer at Dalet, says it may take a while for media companies to have a complete picture of what it means in a business-sense to virtualize all the infrastructure and what benefits that brings. As companies collect data on activities like producing in the cloud, they will be better able to understand the costs associated with IP workflows, she says.

For instance, IP workflows can scale with customer needs, which reduces costs and passes savings to the customer, creating lower cost of ownership, she says.

“From a business point of view, we’re going to see a lot of mindset change in the next three to five years,” Alonso says.

Dalet Pyramid delivers video and graphics productions workflows in the cloud.

Customers may also worry about storage costs, and if they need a lot of processing power may prefer to maintain their archives on-prem for cost reasons, Alonso says.

“That’s a harder case to make at the moment,” she says. “We need a little bit more experience overall, as an industry, for those who hold years of content to feel comfortable that cloud storage is the right solution for them.”

Jérémy Krein, product manager for live video and graphics solutions at Dalet, says some will consider a hybrid solution instead of moving straight from a legacy system to one that is fully IP-based.

Security Concerns

Security is another item broadcasters worry about as workflows transition to an IP environment.

Rich Hill, VP of engineering at National TeleConsultants, says security is an evolving area in broadcast technology. One reason is that many legacy systems, such as devices with hard-coded passwords that are unable to encrypt control messages, don’t support the security that enterprise software typically uses, he says.

“Those days are gone, given the requirements for cloud and other remote access to these networks,” Hill says. “The broadcast system vendors are moving toward support of the network security practices that are common elsewhere in corporate IT.”

One evolving security concern is around devices entering systems, says Lawo CTO Phil Myers.

At first, when only a few hundred devices were entering an IP system, they could easily be managed, but when thousands of devices are plugged in from different locations, that creates some challenges around ensuring devices connecting to the facility are secure, so they won’t damage part of the network or other devices, he says.

Additionally, broadcasters have to protect their contribution links, such as sending very high-quality video of a football game back to the station through a network connection, to ensure no one taps into the network to access the content, Myers says.

A 100GB network switch that carries low latency Jpeg-XS flows to and from the cloud. (Source: NTC)

“IP gives you a lot of great benefits for connectivity, distribution of content, really nice complex workflows, but on the flip side, you have to take care of the basics, looking after the network, looking after the devices from a security perspective,” Myers says.

But, as Lopez points out, cloud providers are doing their share, by spending “hundreds of millions of dollars” ensuring their cloud services are secure.

“They’re spending more dollars on security at a combined level than any one of our individual customers would spend,” he says.

Latency Woes

Latency, on the other hand, will always be a problem for IP workflows, Hill says. “You have the speed of light to deal with.”

The tradeoff, he notes, has generally been around how much bandwidth is needed for a connection versus how much latency is acceptable at what quality.

Sometimes it doesn’t matter if it takes an extra second, but a Super Bowl touchdown being delayed by a moment can be a bigger deal, he says.

And getting equipment to play nice with other components is more difficult in the IP world than the SDI world, Paulsen says. IP equipment includes internet interfaces, which can complicate the works, he says.

“Every piece of equipment, they all have to work on the network, and they all have to work together, and the learning curve is tremendous,” Paulsen says.

As such, he says, ASG is addressing not just how the company trains its own people but how they work with customers to help them “deal with these challenges without scaring them.”

Paul Shen, TVU Networks’ CEO, says IP workflows are evolving toward software as a service (SAAS) offerings.

“SAAS is mainly not at the application level, but at the microservices level,” Shen says. “That is most of what we have seen in the last twelve to 24 months.”

Overall, says Hill, IP workflows are the future.

“It’s not going to go away. It’s going to get simpler to deal with,” he says. “It’s an IP world. There is no going back.”

The post IP Workflows: Upsides Aplenty, Complexities, Too appeared first on TV News Check.

The cloud-native solution, which aims to alleviate some of the pressure newsrooms face to deliver content to multiple platforms, reflects a shift in Dalet’s approach to product development. The new product is easy to use, harnesses the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and facilitates collaboration and remote workflows.

“Newsrooms are under continuous pressure to deliver to more platforms” at a time when they have lower budgets and fewer people, Bea Alonso, Dalet’s chief market officer, says. “We saw the problems.”

Dalet wanted to bring a solution to newsrooms that offered flexibility, agility and collaboration, among other things.

In 2020, Dalet announced it was completely modernizing its newsroom tool suites and seeking feedback for an offering called Dalet Pyramid. The tool, which is now available, represents “modern thinking in how the newsroom should be run,” Alonso says.

And Dalet Pyramid itself is “fundamentally different from any newsroom solution that Dalet has had,” she adds.

The scalable cloud-native solution is offered both under a subscription and SaaS model, Alonso says. This flexibility makes it possible to temporarily add new licenses for the duration of a special event, like the Olympics, she says. As SaaS, Dalet Pyramid transfers the responsibility for architecture and infrastructure from the broadcaster to Dalet, Alonso says, to allow “newsrooms to focus on creating content.”

The development of Pyramid reflects a change in how Dalet approaches product development, she notes. Over the last couple of years, she says, Dalet has shifted to being “more user focused than product focused.”

Last year, Dalet announced to the market that it was working on the Pyramid solution and wanted “the market to tell us how we should evolve this tool,” she says.

Pyramid already included a “digital first” philosophy first when Dalet solicited feedback on the offering, Alonso says. Digital first paves the way for different teams to collaborate on the same story and leverage from one another to create a story for different outlets, she says.

Potential users “really liked the fact that you can work across teams and platforms, including digital teams, and that the digital team doesn’t need its own storytelling and creation platform and can work together with the television team,” she says.

Another bit of feedback centered on having an easy user interface.

“It was important to make the user interface independent of the platform where it was running,” whether that was a specific operating system or a laptop, desktop, mobile or tablet, she says. “That was a huge finding for us.”

And while Dalet designed the user interface to be browser-based, market feedback indicated it also had to be very intuitive for new users so they didn’t have to spend a lot of time being trained on the tools, she says. Instead, she said, the interface had to be intuitive in the same way that mobile phone apps are intuitive.

Potential users also wanted access to the power of AI through Pyramid, she says.

“A lot of AI-driven automation has been included in the solution in the last few months based on user input,” Alonso says.

Pyramid also needed to prioritize remote workflows and enable collaboration, she says, adding that a web-based editor makes it possible to edit remotely, and Trello-like planning boards assists with allocating tasks and resources.

Pyramid is compatible with Dalet Galaxy five and offers new tools for planning, digital production, editing and remote contribution that Galaxy doesn’t have, she says.

Alonso says the initial focus will be to work with some existing Galaxy customers to add on those tools and gradually transition them to Pyramid.

“We learned what works and doesn’t work in the newsroom,” she says. Pyramid “is our response to that.”

The post Dalet Debuts Pyramid For Remote Collaboration, Multiplatform Delivery appeared first on TV News Check.

Cloud-native platforms Dalet Flex, Dalet Media Cortex and Dalet Brio support the industry’s continued transition with flexible hybrid and cloud workflows offering media organizations the digital dexterity they require to power work-from-home scenarios.

Dalet said “robust APIs and integration panels simplify collaboration with creative tools like Adobe Premiere Pro and enterprise applications like Salesforce and Slack, enabling transformative media and business workflows for Dalet customers.”

Updates include:

• “The new FlexXTEND Panel, which provides enhanced NLE integration with creative tools such as Adobe Premiere Pro. The panel features full search and content discovery with free text searching for general queries; advanced filters and sorting for targeted queries against any metadata, and saved searches for common queries.
• “The Dalet Brio ingest and playout platform provides media companies a smooth transition path to full IP production workflows. Offering maximum flexibility for creating and delivering content across hybrid infrastructures, Dalet Brio supports greater density with more ingest and playout streams, making it even easier and faster for companies to migrate operations to IP without disrupting existing workflows that still rely on SDI.
• “The Dalet Media Cortex AI service platform leverages cognitive services and machine learning to offer Dalet customers powerful speech to text, object recognition, facial recognition and automated subtitling services. Recent additions include APIs to translate captions while preserving timing information, eliminating the need to manually re-time translated captions.”

The post Dalet Updates Media Logistics, AI-Driven Production & IP Ingest/Playout Products appeared first on TV News Check.

Migo offers a variety of premium video content for download over local WiFi hotspots called Migo Download Stations (MDS) for offline viewing on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.

The cloud-based Dalet Flex platform, an integral addition to Migo’s unique tech stack, manages the complex video and metadata packaging requirements, ensuring delivery meets partner service license agreements and compliance regulations.

Dalet Flex’s native cloud architecture provided the immense flexibility that Migo needed to adapt to changes caused by the pandemic, while supporting its ambitious growth plans to scale to 1,000 locations this year. It serves as the foundation that connects Migo’s Taiwan, Philippines and Indonesia content operations with comprehensive media logistics capabilities fully orchestrating content packaging.

Migo’s innovative workflow has been shortlisted for the prestigious IBC2021 Innovation Awards and will be presented at the NAB Broadcast Engineering and IT Conference (BEIT) on Wednesday, Oct. 13, at 11:30 a.m. PT.

The post Dalet Enables Migo’s Digital Distribution Growth appeared first on TV News Check.

The company said the newly established leadership roles will focus on “proactive customer success, expanding programs and services that enable customers to get the most from Dalet’s lineup of agile, cloud-native solutions and SaaS offerings.”

“The pandemic drastically accelerated the industry’s move into cloud and SaaS workflows, resulting in updated policies, new work specifications, and improved benchmarks for customer success,” said Stephane Schlayen, chief operating officer, Dalet. “Maria, Ben and Marc will work across the Dalet organization to optimize every aspect of how we support and engage with our customers, from dedicated customer success managers, to making infrastructure complexity transparent and delivering best-in-class mobility solutions. Together, they will build a culture of excellence when it comes to Dalet’s customer experience.”

On the heels of its rebrand, Dalet accelerated the development of its cloud-native and SaaS offerings, including increased investment in its content supply chain and production solution Dalet Flex, the launch of SaaS-based Dalet AmberFin Cloud Transcoder Service and the introduction of the industry’s first SaaS-based enterprise news solution, Dalet Pyramid. Dalet said: “Experts in developing value-based customer experiences, Marc, Ben and Maria bring extensive SaaS and cloud digital transformation expertise to Dalet. Working across the organization, they will leverage Dalet’s data-driven approach to refine package needs and usage, transforming the customer journey with the goal of making it even easier to adopt, deploy and scale Dalet enterprise solutions.”

The post Dalet Makes ‘Key’ Management Appointments appeared first on TV News Check.

The scalable, enterprise-level graphics solution is used by leading broadcasters including Euronews, Mediaset and Teleticino, and now features customizable work spaces that allow users to manipulate graphics in real time during a live show. The update also adds support for working across multiple sites to allow broadcasters to create distributed graphics workflows across all their centers of operation.

All Dalet Cube^NG capabilities, including new features announced today, are available both on-premises and in the cloud:

• New customizable button boards:Users can customize their playout workspace with curated graphic templates that can be triggered on the fly. This allows operators to interact with the live graphics to visually tell more complex stories, keeping audiences informed and engaged.
• Computer graphics (CG) items can now have a shortcut ID:The new Dalet Cube^NG quickplay shortcut lets users quickly trigger the playout of a CG.
• Trigger advanced interaction with graphics:Users can animate graphics like bar charts to show changes in election results over time or zoom in on a map to show exactly where a pandemic has spread. This visually summarizes detailed data and unknown reference points to simplify stories and keep audiences informed.

The solution also introduces new capabilities that enable better collaboration across multi-sites, multi-studios and remote productions with under-the-hood file-based optimizations that ensure scalability and redundancy. Broadcasters can centralize graphics playlists for multiple playout locations. Each graphics playlist can be configured to play in one specific studio or across several. New APIs allow broadcasters to automate the creation of CG playlists across the enterprise.

The post Dalet Updates CubeNG News Graphics Platform appeared first on TV News Check.

Editing in the cloud is expanding beyond clips for digital and social, and different tools are available for light-weight, heavy-weight and hybrid cloud editing workflows. Whether the tools are cloud-native or cloud-based, there are pros and cons for each.

From clipping moments to editing graphics to securely accessing content remotely to tracking rights, vendors are delivering more cloud editing capabilities to broadcasters and working to minimize problems with latency.

According to Raoul Cospen, Dalet’s director of product strategy, news, the pandemic “accelerated the adoption of the cloud by a good five years.”

Before the pandemic, he notes, working from home or distributed locations was becoming a more usual practice, and when customers realized they needed people to be able to work from home, they saw the cloud was a “natural way of doing this.”

Dalet’s new web editor, Pyramid Cut

Even with the industry in the midst of a massive change, Mike Kelley, Grabyo’s president, Americas, says, “it could take years” for the cloud to “take full hold.”

Digital and social teams have primarily used cloud editing tools for the last five years, Kelley says, but Grabyo is moving “more squarely” into the broadcast space and offering more tools that are available via the browser to support broadcast-quality feeds.

Grabyo’s tools are meant for “lightweight editing,” Kelley says. The cloud-based Grabyo Editor is a complement to the Grabyo Clipper, he adds.

Three Cloud Editing Pathways

Cospen cites three main ways of editing in the cloud. In the first instance, the software is in the cloud and editing is connected to cloud storage. The second, web-based editing such as that available with Dalet Pyramid Cut, is good for fast-paced production workflows like news and sports, he says.

The Grabyo editor

The third is remote editing capability with software installed locally on a laptop and local and cloud-hosted content is mixed and edited at the laptop using a low-res proxy while the more intense rendering is done in the back-office or the cloud, he says.

The approach depends on what the broadcaster needs to edit and how that content is going to be used.

For instance, SnapStream Media founder and CEO Rakesh Agrawal says, some customers are going “fully remote” as an online-only operation while others are more of a hybrid, with only some working remotely and using the cloud solution.

People can be confused as to whether an editing program is a cloud-native and cloud-based solution, Overcast CEO Philippe Brodeur says. As Brodeur puts it, “cloud-native solutions are thin on the ground” and are typically used for creating short videos. Cloud-native programs tend to be “all about apps as a service” and are available on SaaS models, he says.

Cloud-based programs are more frequently downloaded and then can be accessed via cloud-based apps. The big shift, he says, has been primarily with broadcasters carrying out remote editing through a virtual desktop that connects to content in media asset managers.

As Raul Alba, director of product marketing – media and cloud at Avid, puts it, there are “different solutions for different situations.”

Broadcasters use Overcast to centralize content workflows.

For instance, Avid offers Media Composer in the cloud or on-prem, but in both cases, users can “connect from anywhere to edit and review” from computers connected to the web, he says. Avid also offers Edit on Demand, which “enables editors to work from anywhere,” Alba adds.

Vidispine’s new browser-based VidiEditor addresses cloud-editing workflows for journalists and video content producers who don’t need access to a complete feature set that would be available through a program like Adobe Premiere, according to Karsten Schragmann, product manager at Vidispine. The VidiEditor feature set, available as a SaaS offering, is based on streaming and proxy streaming and is optimized for fast turnaround workflows and allows for simple effects and voice overs, Schragmann says.

Vidispine worked closely with a public broadcaster in Germany on VidiEditor, Schragmann says. “They produce material with VidiEditor to a certain format like social media or formats that don’t require sophisticated features.” The broadcaster is publishing content straight out of VidiEditor without carrying out a final edit using Premiere, Schragmann adds.

Weighing Pros And Cons

There are some pros and cons to cloud editing.

For starters, cloud editing makes collaboration, review and approvals easier, Brodeur says.

Cospen notes collaboration is very important in cloud editing because “you really need to connect people in a different way.” Dalet’s concept for collaboration is its new Storytelling 360 approach, which is intended to “bring collaboration at the story level.”

Also in the world of collaboration is the fact that graphics can be edited in the cloud while “any number of people” can be working on a given story package at the same time, says Carol Bettencourt, Chryon’s VP of marketing, adding, “Those collaborative workflows exist in the cloud” with Chyron’s cloud-based PRIME Live platform.

Chyron has accelerated its commitment to developing workflows and apps that are available in the cloud, she says.

Cloud storage also makes it easier to find, share and move content around, Brodeur says.

In terms of finding content, Agrawal says, more and more customers have been using SnapStream’s cloud products, particularly since the onset of the pandemic. As people worked remotely during the pandemic, he says, customers had to make content “accessible from anywhere, they couldn’t keep it behind the corporate firewall.”

SnapStream’s cloud-based video workspace allows news and media organizations to create a library of TV video moments, searchable by transcript. Video can be clipped, edited and shared to social media or downloaded for use in any video workflow.

Customers use SnapStream to “surface moments” of existing television video, clip those moments and bring chose clips into a larger piece of content, he says. Previously, the customers would host the television source and use SnapStream to find clips, but as they have increasingly turned to remote operations, they are having SnapStream host the television source, then encode it and upload it to the customer’s SnapStream server, he says.

For broadcasters, security is always a concern, Alba says, and broadcasters have long believed they should keep content isolated and on-site. “But today, there’s enough security to enable them to take advantage of the cloud where it makes sense,” Alba says.

Sometimes, broadcasters have a “huge amount of focus on the main playout workflow” but sometimes “other workflows simply get left behind,” Brodeur says.

That can be a problem, particularly with what he calls “smash workflows,” or quick edits to put content out on social, he says. There often are no workflows around ingest and rights or legal reviews, he says.

“Smash editing is often left on its own to manage itself, and it needs to be brought into the main workflow a lot more. How it’s legalled, how it’s saved, how it’s stored, how it’s archived,” Brodeur says.

As a result, during anniversaries of big events when broadcasters might want to rerun old clips, broadcasters could be “exposed in a whole slew of different ways,” Brodeur says, noting this is one area where Overcast is working to help its broadcast customers.

Latency Concerns

While cloud editing offers a host of benefits, there are some challenges around latency associated with internet bandwidth, Brodeur says. The result can be an upload bottleneck as reporters work to send raw footage into the cloud. The files are “huge, and it takes time” to upload and ingest, he says.

Browser-based VidiEditor provides journalistic and creative users with an HTML5 application that can be used wherever a stable internet connection is available.

Additionally, the storage and computing costs can be high, Brodeur adds. Finally, there are some challenges around ensuring frame accuracy because frame slippage is unacceptable, he says.

According to Blackbird’s Daniel Webster, head of US sales for Blackbird, having more ability to do processing in the cloud and the technologies associated with it will help drive the acceptance of cloud editing.

“You can do most of everything you need to do in a much more efficient way using cloud-native and cloud-friendly technologies,” Webster says.

Broadcasters are starting to understand that cloud-editing capability isn’t just nice to have but is the “best choice,” Blackbird CEO Ian McDonough says. “It is faster, it is cheaper, it is more efficient, it is better for mental health, it is better for carbon efficiency.”

The post Cloud Editing Capabilities Grow, Latency Improves appeared first on TV News Check.

In this webinar, Raoul Cospen, Dalet’s news market director, will be interviewed by TVNewsCheck Editor Michael Depp on better ways to organize news stories.

Propelling digital-first multiplatform workflows, Dalet’s next-generation news production and distribution solution empowers news story creators across all teams to work collaboratively with Storytelling 360.

A live demonstration of Storytelling 360 in action as part of Dalet Unified News Operations will be conducted, and members of the product management team will be available to answer questions from the audience.

Register for “Simplify Your (Journalist) Life with Storytelling 360” here.

All Dalet webinars are available for on-demand streaming after the event date.

The post Dalet webinar will introduce new Storytelling 360 standard appeared first on TV News Check.

Shifts in the global workplace over the past two years have led to more geographically dispersed remote employees that still need to connect to headquarters, colleagues, partners and customers worldwide. To achieve the flexibility needed to serve the new remote workforce, content-focused organizations are prioritizing system interoperability. Aiming to meet those needs are open solutions like Dalet Flex, Dalet Galaxy five and Dalet AmberFin that offer easy integration, to create extensible remote workflows that can be customized with solutions from developers including Adobe, Microsoft and Spectra Logic.

“Dalet has always encouraged our customers and partners to leverage our rich set of APIs to expand their content supply chains while protecting existing investments,” said Bea Alonso, Dalet chief market officer. “Our goal is to help companies grow for sustained success at their own pace, building long-term relationships and real partnerships with our customers.”

Cloud-based infrastructures and services are becoming more practical for content access, storage and asset management. However, many organizations prefer the flexibility of multi-cloud platforms for optimal levels of security, performance and reliability, as well as business continuity and system redundancy.

Bea added: “The company will continue to explore integrations with providers of complementary solutions, especially cloud infrastructures and services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and most recently, Alibaba Cloud, to strengthen its position as a true multi-cloud support vendor. Dalet Flex was one of the earliest cloud content supply chain solutions, and works seamlessly with these four different cloud infrastructure vendors.”

Dalet FlexMAM seamlessly integrates with archive solutions such as Spectra BlackPearl

The newest integrations include:

• Extended Adobe Premiere Pro integrations for Dalet Flex and Dalet Galaxy five to support a wider set of editing scenarios, especially remote editing. FlexXTEND, the Dalet Flex panel integrated within Adobe Premiere Pro now includes the ability to collaborate, store and archive Adobe Premiere Pro projects for centralized management.
• Dalet Galaxy xCloud on Microsoft Azure to support cloud-based radio production workflows and extend Dalet Galaxy xCloud to a wider range of customers.
• Dalet Flex and Dalet Galaxy five with Spectra Logic’s BlackPearl RioBroker Archive to enhance existing workflow orchestration with expanded archive management capabilities.
• Other recent Dalet integrations include Dalet Flex with Online Video Platform provider Kinow, Dalet AmberFin Cloud Transcoder Service with InSync FrameFormer and increased device support for Dalet OnePlay including Telemetrics Robotics and Avid Maestro.

The post Dalet Adds Third-Party Integrations, Partnerships 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.

Dalet Flex’s comprehensive media logistics capabilities have enabled content producers and distributors to scale content supply chains, keeping pace with a global content consumption appetite that has doubled over the past year. Its cloud-native architecture supports hybrid and full cloud workflows allowing companies to quickly adapt to a distributed workforce during global rolling shutdowns. Dalet Flex’s quarterly updates range from significant workflow enhancements to administrative fine tuning, always keeping customers up to date with the latest advances in media logistics workflows.

The update features:

• Support for Alibaba Cloud brings China’s biggest cloud provider to the list of natively supported cloud options, which include AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. The poly-cloud SaaS approach gives customers immense scalability and flexibility with the granular control required to manage complex SLAs and media logistics workflows. Check out this blog post for more details on deployment options with Dalet Flex.
• Dalet Flex thesaurus puts structure around content so assets are both named and indexed correctly. The controlled vocabulary offers consistency to asset naming and indexing, simplifying the cataloging of content for users while Dalet Flex’s permissions management allows only selected users to enrich a tag collection, keeping metadata orderly. Complimenting the Thesaurus are numerous enhancements to Dalet Flex search capabilities. New wildcard search support lets users set up targeted search terms for a wide or very specific set of results.
• The new “markers groups” allow users to carry out a single search with a collection of related terms. This is ideal for locating content that may violate compliance guidelines or content shot in specific locations with certain actors.
• Continued improvements to the FlexMAM application, including additional administration tasks that allow non-administrators to set up access levels and define default application settings, optimizing productivity.

The post Dalet Flex Adds Thesaurus And Improved Search While Gaining Poly-Cloud Options appeared first on TV News Check.

According to Dalet, “significant performance gains and a new browser interface keeps Dalet AmberFin ahead of new industry demands towards higher quality on more devices and more flexible workflows. Built-in support for audio normalization specialists, Emotion Systems, ensures audio output is optimized for global delivery to multiple listening environments.”

“The rapid evolution of digital cinema and video technology has given us images that are stunningly good. 4K resolution, HDR and immersive audio are not only appreciated by today’s viewers but expected too,” says Eric Carson, director, Dalet AmberFin Product Strategy. “Viewing screens, including smartphones, can reveal image quality — good and bad — with forensic precision. Consequently, it’s more important than ever that the original image quality achieved by a film director or TV producer is preserved for audiences to experience as intended. We are committed to keeping Dalet AmberFin on the forefront of media processing with continued improvements in speed and usability both on-premises and in the cloud.”

Every feature of the Dalet AmberFin platform, including the improvements in the latest release (v11.9), are available both on-premises and in the Dalet AmberFin Cloud Transcoder Service. Dalet AmberFin customers can control their on-premises and cloud transcoding resources from the same workflow engine and API, and natively use the same conversion profiles and workflows for both fixed and elastic capacity without the use of a cloud port or service team.

New features and capabilities available today include:

• Enhancements to the Dalet AmberFin transcoding engine provide, on average, a 30% increase in throughput, offering customers an even faster speed-to-market for high-quality conversions.
• New web-based conversion profile editor provides engineers a modern interface for managing day-to-day configuration.
• Emotion System’s advanced audio processing and loudness normalization capabilities enhance Dalet AmberFin’s best-in-class video conversion capabilities with loudness correction and global delivery compliance requirements.

When coupled with Dalet’s content production, management and distribution solutions, Dalet AmberFin “becomes a uniquely powerful transcoding and media orchestration platform, perfect for ensuring that the right content is available at the highest quality, properly wrapped, and all as part of an automated and dependable process,” the company says.

Carson concludes: “For many of our clients, media processing is only part of the equation. Packaging for mass distribution is often a requirement. Dalet AmberFin combined with Dalet Flex and Dalet Galaxy five brings a much needed, high-quality transcoding and precision packaging solution for global distribution encoding requirements.”

The post Dalet AmberFin Receives Performance Boost, Browser-Based Configuration Interface appeared first on TV News Check.

The old way of shooting news, with a full camera and reporter crew in the field, is gone. Media is expected to be delivered in near real-time with editing and storytelling done on any device from any location. The same goes for developing storylines. There are multiple contributors and thus multiple storylines. They need ways to collaborate and share content beyond the confines of the newsroom.

Audience habits have changed too. They want frequent updates on stories with rich graphics and relevant context that help paint the full picture.

The future newsroom needs to be able to deal with more news sources and have a far greater control over editorial and media sources to prevent the spreading of fake news.

Dalet Pyramid — The Virtualized News Production Environment

Current news production systems heavily rely on on-premises physical equipment and are rundown centric, limiting the ability to create and distribute news anywhere and anytime during a pandemic.

We have created a way for journalists and news professionals to work and collaborate in a virtualized environment, bringing their digital news workflows to the level beyond.

The Dalet Pyramid web editor

Dalet Pyramid ushers in a new era of agility, flexibility and mobility for content creation. It provides an integrated solution for news production, content management and multi-platform distribution, all accessible through a web-based user experience. Introducing the concept of 360 storytelling, Dalet Pyramid enables all teams to simultaneously work on multiple story angles, anytime, anywhere. Offered on a subscription basis, the solution can be natively deployed in the cloud, on-premises or in a hybrid configuration.

A Collaborative, Digital-First Workflow 

Dalet Pyramid is the next-generation of our Unified News Operations solution and features the NRCS, news production system and media asset management core, all wrapped around a collaborative, digital-first workflow. The brand-new digital editorial and editing tools enable news teams to collaborate in a virtualized environment with access to the assets and modern capabilities that enable storytelling across all platforms from a single source. The cross-collaboration enriches news production, with many perspectives, angles and formats to deliver it in. All of the activity is well-managed through a centralized dashboard that simplifies monitoring of resources, assets and stories in progress. This is 360-storytelling: a new story-centric approach that enables teams to collaborate together at the story level.

Journalists can plan how a story will iterate on social, mobile, web and linear

Enabling a true borderless newsroom, the virtualized environment leverages cloud infrastructure, enabling new levels of mobility and service including the extensive use of AI to better manage and utilize millions of assets. Agile SaaS models mean shorter release cycles and transparent upgrades that ensure operators have the very latest capabilities. Combined with the increased usability, operators will be able to lower their TCO.

During these last few months, we have helped many of our news customers adapt to the new conditions and adopt different work practices to cope with the challenges of lockdowns and social distancing inflicted by COVID-19. Dalet Pyramid enables them to approach in a more systematic way and positively transform their business and explore new work models that enable them to deal with the challenges of an industry that sees rapidly changing news media consumption habits.

A virtualized newsroom with its ecosystem of digital-first tools will change the way journalists work to produce compelling stories. This is what newsmakers and vendors can achieve together: changing the way they tell news, for good.

Raoul Cospen is director of product strategy for news at Dalet.

The post The future of news production is now appeared first on TV News Check.

Being the first to break a story on multiple platforms can generate big wins, such as increased engagement and more downloads of their apps, for broadcasters who invest in the necessary infrastructure. At the same time, journalists don’t want to cede all decision making to an automated system, so at least one vendor is offering hybrid automation when it comes to managing social media tools.

Because newsrooms need to plan and generate multiple social media posts to multiple platforms, vendors are offering integrated and streamlined solutions aimed at reducing “tool fatigue” and creating “coherent workflows.”

The amount of interaction on social and mobile apps during election week in the U.S. was “just through the roof,” says Ray Thompson, Avid’s director of market solutions, broadcast and media, and is “a good reason for media companies to invest in the infrastructure to do that and do it well.”

By example, he points to an Avid MediaCentral customer in France who broke the news about the Notre Dame fire. Afterward, he says, they analyzed the impact of being the first one to air and social media with the news, and “it was significant.” It allowed them to monetize the content on their own app and a number of people saw the news in their feed and downloaded the app, he says.

Avid’s MediaCentral Publisher is an add-on, cloud-based app that customers can use to replicate content “pretty much instantly” into the cloud environment, where the aspect ratio can be changed and graphics, closed captioning and advertising can be added, to name a few tasks.

The speed at which that happens makes it possible for broadcasters to “get the story out and get it out fast to use social media platforms to drive eyeballs back to their own apps so they can monetize it.”

Degrees Of Automation

Automation is one of the tools that reduces fatigue and repetition, but according to Social News Desk President Kim Wilson, newsrooms have fluctuated in how much automation they’re willing to use.

“We’ve seen newsrooms go from 100% manual publishing to pushing the boundaries of automation and doing as much automation as possible, and then starting to pull back from that,” she says. “They’re saying: ‘We’re journalists and subject matter experts. We don’t want to turn everything over to a place where journalism isn’t part of the decision-making process.’”

Social News Desk’s hybrid-automation publishing technology inside SND Dashboard.

Because newsrooms are looking for “some assistance” in terms of decision making, SND developed hybrid automation that “blends artificial intelligence with good old-fashioned journalism,” she says.

The result is a tool that blends data science and AI to identify content that’s overperforming on social media, a website or within a media group as a whole then make suggestions via the SND dashboard and allow the journalist to decide how to proceed.

CBS Local is one of the groups in SND’s test drive team using the hybrid automation solution this year.

“It takes some of the manual work out of it to make the most out of some of the content they’re creating,” Wilson says.

Several hundred newsrooms are using this hybrid automation during the beta phase, and SND expects to release it widely in 1Q 2021, she says.

A New Toolset

According to Dalet’s Raoul Cospen, director of product strategy, news, many TV newsrooms have separate media production and digital teams, often using different tools. Frequently, the digital content follows the television team, rather than vice versa, he says.

Dalet is focused on changing how newsrooms plan, create and publish content for both social media and digital platforms, he says, and this affects not just scripting tools but editing and other tools as well.

“It’s a set of tools that varies a bit from the traditional editing setup tools,” Cospen says. “We are trying to bring everything together into the same toolset.”

Currently, Dalet offers its Galaxy platform, and a new platform called Dalet Pyramid was announced Tuesday (Nov. 17).

Cospen describes Dalet Pyramid as a place where, for a single story, the user will be able to access all the functionalities at the editorial and operational levels. It allows ingest of content from different sources and indicates who is assigned which tasks, he says.

Dalet’s Social Media Framework Aggregator Panel makes it possible to leverage social media for their evolving narratives in the newsroom.

The upshot is the ability to have “a single-user interface with everyone that can do his piece. So, different specialties, different job profiles are collaborating together at the same time through the story,” Cospen says.

Further, he says, because it will give the digital team access to all the production tools, it will create the opportunity to “go digital first, meaning leave the freedom to the digital team to take the lead on a story, rather than waiting for the story to be produced on TV and broadcast on TV before it can go even to social media platforms.”

Mass Post Creation

The latest version of the Octopus Newsroom Computer System streamlines social media content creation by allowing the mass creation of social media posts.

“You can easily create one website post and link it with 15 different social media posts created automatically for you,” says Peter Grena, presales consultant, Octopus Newsroom.

That is especially convenient, he says, when there is one topic, but multiple stories and multiple social media posts required. Grena says a 24/7 channel in Michigan uses Octopus to rapidly create and publish social media content to multiple locations, specified by region, once a story airs.

And Octopus makes it possible not just to plan the posts and schedule when and where they publish, but also to harvest existing social media content and efficiently turn it into a useable graphic, he says.

Gene Sudduth, national sales director, North America, for Octopus Newsroom, says Octopus has a special API integration with Vizrt, which makes it possible to drag the content of a tweet directly into a rundown, “and it will automatically select the proper graphic template and display that immediately.”

Reducing ‘Tool Fatigue’

Merging digital needs into standard newsroom workflows has generated some difficulties, observes Brian Doyle, director of product management for The Associated Press’ ENPS.

“Trying to fit a digital workflow into a broadcast rundown doesn’t feel like the best match for those types of workflows,” Doyle says. It would be a “difficult marriage to make between the two.”

After AP realized its newsroom was struggling with editorial planning across social media, the organization developed Playbook, a browser-based editorial planning solution now available to other newsrooms.

AP’s ENPS and Playbook work together to enable newsrooms to schedule and publish social media content.

Currently, broadcasters find themselves using multiple tools throughout the story process, including NRCS, editing systems, user-generated content ingest, cutting video and content management systems.

“There’s still some tool fatigue out there,” he says. “You find yourself in five or six or 10 different tools throughout the day.”

AP is investigating how to “get them the tools to reduce that tool fatigue and bring them into a single experience and not five or six or seven or eight different experiences and user interfaces,” Doyle says.

Decreasing Turnaround Time

Ross Video is focused on decreasing the turnaround time needed to create and publish social media content, says Jenn Jarvis, the company’s product manager, editorial workflow. That means, she says, “a more coherent workflow” with an integrated approach for social and web content.

“If we can bring it into their core workflow and break down the barriers and extra steps,” Jarvis says, it makes it “more feasible” and allows customers “to focus on the content they’re creating” with a single tool and sign-in.

Many larger organizations have different teams using different tools and platforms for planning and creating content, she says. This can be problematic because it increases the possibility of the loss of information between teams or the duplication of effort, she adds.

But using a single platform like Ross Video’s Inception, which originated as a social media management tool before the NRCS element became available, can reduce those risks.

Ross Video’s Inception eliminates manual steps like downloading, resizing, reformatting, and copy and pasting content into the graphics system and includes an assignment manager that can be used to plan necessary content and assign tasks.

“By bringing these teams onto a shared platform, it allows them to plan together, to have visibility of what all the teams are working on,” Jarvis says. This is critical, she says, because “it can sometimes be labor-intensive to create content for different platforms, and it can be a distraction to the news teams when they have to think about 10 different platforms throughout the day.”

Inception eliminates manual steps like downloading, resizing, reformatting and copy and pasting content into the graphics system and includes an assignment manager that can be used to plan necessary content and assign tasks.

She says it’s the role of vendors to create tools newsrooms need to publish to multiple social media platforms, but newsrooms themselves have to embrace the need for multiplatform content creation.

“It does sometimes require a change in thinking and a bit of a culture change in the newsroom to think about content more comprehensively,” Jarvis says. “If we can break down those reservations by making the process easier, it’s going to encourage multiplatform content creation to become the norm.”

The post TVN Tech | Social Media Management Gets Smarter appeared first on TV News Check.

Designed to accelerate the evolution of news organizations and serve distributed teams, Dalet Pyramid, “ushers in a new era of agility, flexibility and mobility for content creation,” the company says. It provides an integrated solution for news production, content management and multi-platform distribution, all accessible through a web-based user experience. Offered on a subscription basis, the solution can be natively deployed in the cloud, on-premises or in a hybrid configuration.

Dalet Pyramid wraps all of Dalet’s news innovation within a modern workspace with natively integrated tools that enable 360-storytelling and faster breaking news across all viewing platforms. News producers can create content from anywhere for all audiences with sophisticated media asset management and orchestration powering all ingest, production, delivery and archive workflows. Propelling digital-first multiplatform workflows, the new solution is designed to offer remote workforces comprehensive editorial, graphics and distribution tools accessible from desktop and mobile devices.

“Editorial and production teams need to collaborate more efficiently on stories for all platforms from any location. Conversely, audiences love their news and want access on their favorite device, at all times,” said Raoul Cospen, director of product strategy, news at Dalet. “Tying your story line-up to a rundown limits production workflows and the efficiency for stories to be delivered across platforms. With more than two-thirds of newsrooms distributing content to an average of four platforms, it is a natural next step to refocus the newsroom away from rundowns and reimagine their operations. Dalet Pyramid gives news professionals the creative freedom to focus on the story, with collaborative tools and efficient resource planning to feed all audience platforms. It’s a holistic news experience that enables great storytelling.”

Encompassing 20 years of Dalet expertise in news workflows, Dalet Pyramid’s digital-first content production approach offers outstanding mobility for individuals and teams working remotely as well as agility and flexibility for storytelling across radio, TV, digital and web.

Raoul says: “With Dalet Pyramid we have completely revamped the user workspace to offer an exceptional creative experience and all the conveniences you expect from a modern architecture including native-cloud support, configurable workflows, scalability, enterprise-level security, frequent feature updates and accessibility across devices. It’s one platform to serve your entire multichannel news operations.”

With Dalet Pyramid, production tasks such as ingest, scripting, audio and video editing, digital versioning and graphics are always connected to the story, enabling multi-user collaboration and speeding up news delivery to audiences. Advanced AI capabilities automate metadata tagging and provide real-time contextual recommendations, saving valuable time logging and searching content while optimizing use of all relevant assets for editorial.

Designed For Fast Deployment And Total Control Over Resources And Budgets

Dalet Pyramid can be set up for cloud, on-premises or hybrid operations. The intuitive configuration module and open APIs give greater control to system administrators, requiring less ramp-up time. Customers opting for cloud will benefit from immense flexibility and elasticity in managing resource fluctuations, with the ability to spin up additional seats when immediate user access is needed, without the need to increase capital investment.

Flexible Business Model, More Frequent Release Cycles And Elasticity

Dalet Pyramid will be offered in a range of flexible business models, such as subscription and SaaS, enabling news organizations to calculate resource costs with precision. Shorter development cycles and regular updates ensure users are up to date with the latest functionality with minimal operational disruption.

Raoul concludes: “The subscription and usage-based business models give our customers tremendous visibility and a real opportunity to lower their TCO.”

The post Dalet Pyramid Aims To Unify News Operations appeared first on TV News Check.