Fourth Annual Excellence Awards
Newsroom technology – Network nominee

The AP’s Washington, DC, broadcast news center is tethered tightly to its White House satellite site, but it has long sought a solution to increase the flexibility of routing feeds between the two facilities. When the White House press office asked them to relocate a few doors down the hall from its former space, the organization took advantage of the move to revamp its routing infrastructure.

Its White House routing system, comprised of Network Electronics’ VikinX A1616 and V1616 routers, had previously been controlled solely from a P-16 Pro-XY control panel located onsite. The engineering staff designed a configuration that would allow remote operation of the White House routers via THOR – a PC-based control platform -from its Washington, DC, K Street broadcast news center.

The new system gives the AP an additional measure of flexibility and off-site control capability.

THOR uses a traditional telephone dial-up to connect a stand-alone modem — no PC needed on the remote end — directly to the routers’ RS-232 control port. Once connected, control is achieved via the basic point-to-point switching feature of the GUI interface on a PC with real-time switching capability.

With the new system, feeds from numerous White House positions — the briefing room, north lawn, rose garden, stake out, and more — are monitored by the K Street staff, recorded, edited and distributed to any number of news agencies. The new system has made it possible for the AP to be in two places at once by eliminating the need for maintaining an on-site White House operator. Now news and announcements are covered as they happen — not when someone gets there!