The Associated Press (AP) and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) marked the tenth anniversary of the agreement to install ENPS – the electronic news production system – for its global broadcasting operation. Today, ENPS is used in 40% of the world’s newsrooms by more than 40,000 reporters, writers, editors and producers across 48 countries. The ENPS installation at the BBC continues to be the largest broadcast newsroom operation in the world, supporting around 12,000 users responsible for all of the BBCs radio and TV news programmes.
ENPS tracks thousands of words of text, hundreds of hours of audio, and video streaming in and out of the BBC everyday. It feeds online operations and helps the World Service broadcast in more than 30 languages.
ENPS is a vital technological structure which holds together BBC News, from the 24-hour news operations in London, to the smallest regional radio station, to the furthest far-flung foreign correspondent with laptop and modem. This huge global operation gives journalists unparalleled access to networked information and more control from their desktops and in the field.
The BBC – a pioneer in news technology – selected ENPS in 1996 from an original slate of 65 companies. Since then, there has been a revolution in newsroom integration and constant refinement of the system.
“When we started in 1996 with ENPS we had 4,600 work stations, today we have grown to around 7,000 work stations, said Adrian van Klaveren, Deputy Director of BBC News. Throughout, ENPS has been flexible enough to adapt to our growing needs and allowed us to be effective and competitive.”
AP led the development of the MOS protocol introduced in 1998 which has been crucial to the development of the integrated newsroom. It has enabled journalists to access multiple third-party applications through the ENPS window. This means ENPS can integrate a range of production functions including video servers and editors, audio servers and editors, still stores, character generators, and special effects devices. MOS is used by more than 50 manufacturers in development of interfaces for easily connecting and integrating newsroom computer systems and broadcast production equipment.
“ENPS sits at the heart of our domestic and international news output and a complex matrix of broadcast systems. MOS is the communication path that holds this matrix together, linking our core news production system with the necessary video and audio servers to get our programmes to air,” said Julie Foster, the BBCs ENPS Project Director. “It’s a very stable and resilient broadcast environment.”
ENPS is designed for multi-language use and operates in over 40 languages. Different scripts can be selected e.g. Arabic, Greek, simplified and traditional Chinese and the Indian language scripts. In addition, on-screen commands and other text can be modified to native language and even local dialects.
Looking to the future, the BBC and Associated Press have joined forces with the UK’s leading broadcast journalism courses to provide a major free training initiative for the next generation of TV and radio journalists.
Today, all journalism courses accredited by the Broadcast Journalism Training Council (BJTC) can install the ENPS news production system free of charge enabling undergraduate and postgraduate students to gain practical experience of work in a newsroom environment.