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Likemany news organisations around the world,
international broadcasters are today looking for
technical innovations to help them create more
content and to manage it more efficiently. For
most, this means digital media storage and non-
linear editing, and links between news editorial
and production systems allowing playlist
construction, ordering and control by producers,
working from a news rundown.
John Conway is an editorial system manager
for the BBC. “Colleagues working on the
Jupiter Project are looking for technical
solutions which will help News 24 (mainly for
the UK), BBC World (international), News
Online and the other news outlets to have much
easier and faster access to raw video for editing
and broadcast,” Conway says, adding that the
need to share content is greater than ever before.
Conway, a veteran of many digital projects as
well as the introduction of ENPS (AP’s
Electronic News Production System) across the
BBC, is now the BBC’s ENPS project director.
He points out the scale of the BBC project is
immense, with more than 7500 PCs accessing
the news system worldwide and more than 300
hours of video coming into BBC each day.
What’s more, the growth of interactive
television and more digital channels in the UK
is also opening new platforms for news
output—platforms which may demand higher
levels of automation and integration beyond the
first phases of digital conversion.
That’s where some new 24-hour automated
channels may come in. For more than a year now,
severalU.S.broadcastsiteshavebeenusingsystems
whichmake it easier than ever before to programa
round-the-clock channel with few staffers.
Conway has toured one of these news channels
(Time Warner Cable’s, in Charlotte, North
Carolina) and says the work methods used there
may serve as pointers to the successful deployment
of complex new technology mixes. “Ideally,” he
says, you “start small and get it right in one
location, before you rollout anywhere else.”
At each of these 24-hour sites, (a total of six are
now on the air) producers have unprecedented
control over output, using a suite of applications
which support the MOS [Media Object Server]
Protocol. MOS is an open, xml-based
communication protocol for connecting news
and media servers.
Here’s how it works. Imagine you have reporters
and photographers out in the field, coming back
to the station, writing and editing reports. You
also have the more “standard” elements of a
newscast—pre-produced features, weather,
traffic reports and the like.
In the automated 24-hour news model, each of
these elements is recorded separately by an
anchor into a “collective” clip. A package or
“wrap” introduction, the reporter presentation,
and the anchor tag are all recorded into one slot
in the video server. Likewise for voice-overs and
readers. Every element that would be in a
newscast is recorded as a discrete itemand placed
into a large “pool” of clips fromwhich producers
can then program their specific hours of news.
Most stories will consist of text, video and
captions. Scripts are written with all these
elements included and arranged in the order they
will be played out in the production control
room—for final “recording” and placement in
the days news pool.
For example, a story on the markets might have
this structure:
Story Title: Stock Markets
Text
MOS Full screen SS Item
MOS Video Item
MOS CG Item
MOS CG Item
Now, since we are recording all those elements
into a unified clip that will be later dragged into
the wheel rundown, an additional MOS media
“slot” is needed. With advanced functionality
enabled in ENPS, producers can—from the
ENPS rundown—easily request that a media
slot be “auto created” on the media server.
Importantly, this “slot”—into which the
elements will be recorded—is automatically
titled with the exact name of the story item, and
ENPS automatically inserts this new
“summary” MOS item at the top of the story
script, so that it will look like this:
Story Title: Stock Markets
MOS Summary Item
Text
MOS Full screen SS Item
MOS Video Item
MOS CG Item
MOS CG Item
ENPS and the automation systems are configured
so that when this script is dragged into a “wheel”
rundown, only the first or “summary” item,
which now references a new clip which includes
the entire story’s elements, will be played to air.
Once items are recorded and have been dragged
into the wheel rundown, the system shows the
producer duration and statusmessages.The ability
tomonitor this status saves theproducer significant
time, without which it would be difficult to
effectively manage several hours of content.
To be sure, this is not the first time “wheels”
have been created from such single elements,
and presented pre-recorded. What’s different
here is the level of interaction between the non-
linear system [for video, stills, and captions]
and the ENPS system and the ease with which
producers can move completed material to
multiple “air” rundowns.
Once in place, stories in the “air wheel”
rundowns can be easily reordered by the
producer, to provide variety from hour to hour.
In fact, essentially similar rundowns can be re-
ordered to suit the tastes of particular “zones”
of coverage. In other words, a story which is
big news in one town or neighbourhood may
not play as prominently in another—and the
producer can almost as easily produce two
“custom” rundowns as one. At the appropriate
start time, the automation systemwill “pick up”
the MOS active rundown and play it out to air.
In addition to the ease of building the rundowns,
there is also an important built-in flexibility. By
using advanced capabilities of the MOS
protocol, programs have “live” events pre-
programmed inside them. For example, a
producer would slot in a “pause event” where a
live traffic or weather report would go, and the
playout can stop automatically while the live
portion is presented. Once the report is
complete, the automated playout resumes.
This function is especially important when the
station has to deal with breaking news. When
there is a breaking news event, the wheel
producer would likewise insert a “pause event”
into the wheel rundown, allowing the production
control room to be taken live for the coverage.
At this point, since the remaining elements in the
newscast are all automated and ready to go, the
entire resources of the news channel if needed can
be concentrated on covering the breaking news.
In fact, if there is a second control room
available, that control room can continue to
produce recorded elements to be added to the
pool, so that as soon as the breaking news report
is over, additional fresh material can be added.
Conway cautions that despite the technical
capabilities of these sites, larger organizations
will have to approach these workflows
cautiously. “Anyone with the luxury of a
Greenfield site can start fully digital operations
from day one but, in an outfit that has to
maintain round-the-clock output, managers and
staff are more reluctant to say one bulletin will
use analogue kit and the next one digital.
Inevitably in these environments, people will
look for a halfway house that allows for a more
gradual transition to the new technologies. They
also often have tomake sure the new technology
will work along with existing systems which
may still be around for several years.”
Highly automated systems offer efficiencies and new options for 24-hour output, says
Bill Burke
, Product Manager, AP Broadcast Technology
New options for 24 hour
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