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Making up almost a third of the Earth’s land
area, and home to 3.3 billion people, Asia is
probably the world’s most impressive
continent. It’s also home to some of the most
remote, inhospitable spots imaginable, where
setting up communications infrastructure to
serve isolated communities can be next to
impossible. Without a fixed infrastructure,
broadcasters must rely on satellite
communications to file stories.
If there’s one event which exemplified the trends
in broadcasting from remote and demanding
locations, it is the Iraq conflict. Broadcast
reporters and their crew faced everything from
storms in the desert battlefields to guerilla
warfare in the streets of Baghdad. Despite these
challenges, the war was one of the most heavily
reported in history. So just how did field
reporters file stories almost instantly from the
most demanding conditions? The answer is
simple. News teams used broadcasting
products that aremore flexible than ever before.
That flexibility is vital given the unprecedented
demands of news organisations.Web coverage
and the proliferation of round-the-clock TV
reporting has raised the bar for the timeliness
of news delivery, and audiences are willing to
accept a lower quality picture to watch
breaking stories. The days of reports taking
two weeks to air, which occurred as recently
as the 1982 Falklands conflict, are long gone.
Small, highly responsive news teams using
versatile, reliable and lightweight kit are now
able to report live from all over Asia.
Today’s equipment greatly eases filming and
editing. However, the cameraman or journalist is
likely tobe relativelyunfamiliarwith filming and
editing.Technologyisgivingthemahelpinghand.
Using Livewire Digital’s M-Link Voyager Lite
platform, for example, it’s easy to select the codec
(compression/decompression)profileandtodeliver
footage with the correct balance between quality
and transmission speed for the targetmedium.
In addition to the swift compression
of video, modern laptops now have
the processing power to run
professional quality editing
packages, such as Pinnacle’s Liquid
purple and Avid’s DV Xpress,
giving reporters access to top-
quality editing facilities in the field.
This provides a significant
improvement in editing quality from
simple ‘crash recording’ (stop/start
editing) and ‘top and tailing’ (cutting
material from the beginning or end
of footage). Two key benefits
accrue: it saves expensive satellite
uplink costs because only pre-
edited footage needs to be transmitted; and the
news centre needs little or no time to edit footage
before broadcast.
Once mobile news crews have captured and
edited their story, they need a highly versatile
satellite link to relay it back to base.
Broadcasters found that Inmarsat via the
Thuraya satellite offered more reliable
connections than the competing Iridiumphone.
Using multi-terminal equipment, up to four
64Kbit/s channels can be aggregated, offering
transfer rates of up to 256Kbit/s over satellite.
Where there is no direct need for flexibility,
mobility or guaranteed delivery time, such as
filing background stories from the base camp
or the hotel, Voyager Lite can use IP services
or terrestrial dial-up links such as ISDN,VSAT,
Inmarsat MPDS or R-BGAN. This gives
reporters the choice to stay highly mobile in
the field with one or two Inmarsat GAN
terminals, or to send broadcast quality store-
and-forward footage over a higher bandwidth
Asia challenges news-gatherers
It’s inhospitable, there’s little infrastructure and it’s either
baking or freezing. So how do you get your story back
to your newsroom?
Tristan Wood
says it’s all a matter of the right kit.
or more cost-efficient line.
All the required equipment will now fit into a
shoulder-bag weighing in at just a few kilos.
For broadcasters, thismeans better coverage and
a dramatic cost saving, as a field teamcan consist
of two people – a reporter and a cameraman.
Digital video (DV) cameras are nowa great deal
smaller and lighter, and offer better reliability
and quality than their predecessors. Thanks to
high-speed, standard interfaces such as
FireWire, a camera and PCcan link together and
communicate inminutes, without a complex and
error-prone configuration procedure.
A range of technologies is converging to let
remote newsgathering teams deliver as-it-
happens news to broadcasters. New codec
standards such as MPEG-4 allow much
higher video quality at a given bit rate, while
smaller, lighter kit means news teams can
get to the site of a story in record time. The
inclusion of leading editing and broadcast
software means material can be sent back to
the broadcasters ready for transmission. It
may be some time before reporters can file
stories fromAsia as easily as they can from
Europe or North America, but we should see
the volume and timeliness of stories from
the world’s largest continent improve
dramatically over the next decade.
Anyone seen our correspondent?
I’m over here...
Tristan Wood is Managing Director of
Livewire Digital
, a
specialist consultancy providing remote
newsgathering equipment and services to
broadcasting companies.
