News moves to three screens
Oct 1, 2007 12:00 PM
Three-screen destinations for news content — including traditional broadcast, satellite and cable TV as well as the Internet and mobile devices such as cell phones — require TV journalists to re-evaluate who they are and what they do. Shown here is BSkyB’s interactive sports channel, Sky Sports Active, where Harris NEXIO and NewsFlash editors are used to edit highlight packages.
Cell phones, mobile TV devices and the Internet may be creating a bit of an identity crisis these days for TV newsrooms.
Are the journalists who work there broadcasters first, or are they content providers? That seemingly simple question is packed with implications for how stations approach news, select technology and allocate resources.
“What we really have to start doing is understanding that the Web is no longer a necessary evil,” says Johnathon Howard, Avid Technology director, Broadcast and Media Publishing. “It's going to be part of survival going forward for traditional broadcasters. The competition is coming after the eyeballs that TV stations have previously owned.”
In other words, if stations don't look for ways to leverage the Web, they risk losing ground to newspapers and others that do.
With their long track record of covering their local markets and an ability to gather raw news footage and turn it into stories, local stations have a leg up in this competition for now.
“Broadcast television newsrooms have a great advantage,” says Ed Casaccia, director of product management & marketing for Thomson Grass Valley Digital News Production. “They already have the infrastructure in place to go out and acquire the actuality material. They've got the crews to do it, and they are beginning to think of themselves more as content producers and less as (being locked to) transmitters.”
Paul Slavin, ABC News senior VP newsgathering, agrees.
“We need to find ways to morph our businesses in that direction,” Slavin says, “and we need to find the value that we — particularly in broadcast and television — can bring to those mediums.”
Content approaches
For television stations with limited staffs, resources and time, creating content for the Web and cell phones can be challenging. Certainly, running the same exact story on a Web site or cell phone that aired is the easiest approach, but it probably also is the least helpful.
“One of the biggest things I've seen — and that I find frustrating — is that we hear broadcasters saying, ‘For more information, go to our Web site at www.whatever,’ and when you go to that Web site, it's the exact same content you saw on TV,” Howard says. “It's not unique content.”
Repurposing content offers a more appealing approach from an editorial point of view. If done properly, it can have minimal impact on newsroom workflow.
“Generally speaking, file-based workflows are innately suitable for repurposing,” Casaccia says. “At that level, the repurposing target is a non-issue because what's going to happen is somewhere in the process, you are going to customize the media for the delivery method — the old concept of COPE (create once, publish everywhere).”
According to Casaccia, the workflow in creating the prime media for the initial distribution doesn't need to change.
At WRDW-TV in Augusta, GA, editors and photographers use the the Avid NewsCutter system for more involved pieces (shown), while reporters and producers edit simpler stories from their desktops with Avid iNEWS Instinct editing stations.
“What has to happen during that workflow is at the appropriate points when identified by the appropriate people, hooks or flags have to be put on the material to say, ‘From this point to this point — a mark in and mark out, if you will — this area of this media is going to be repurposed in the following one or more ways,’” he says. “Right from that point, you start creating associations.”
Those associations don't have to be confined to audio and video essence but can include graphics, titles and other pertinent production elements.
“What you wind up doing is tasking the metadata system more than the primary essence file delivery system,” he says. “You need to add descriptors that are durable. How they are used downstream is determined by the medium. To enable really facile, elegant, efficient repurposing is actually almost entirely a function of the metadata.”
Building original, new stories for distribution via the Web or cell phone may be the ultimate step in the broadcaster-to-content-producer makeover, but it's also the most involved.
“Generally, when you go out and shoot footage for a story, you might have a 30-minute tape that's full of great footage,” Howard says. “You probably used about 15 or 20 seconds of it during that 30-second story (on-air). So, there's a lot of content there that you're already paying someone for. What you need are the tools that really enable you to use that content when it's new and fresh and not as an afterthought.”
Cell phones and mobile TV
Metadata is critical to thriving in a three-screen news world. The Thomson Grass Valley Aurora news production system can pull assignment metadata from the newsroom computer and send it to an Infinity camcorder in the field.
At the same time stations are tweaking their workflows and editorial choices to support a greater presence for their news content on the Internet, cell phones and mobile TV devices are entering the picture as viable news delivery platforms.
The potential for this market is significant. A report released in September from Juniper Research forecasted about 120 million mobile users in more than 40 countries will receive broadcast television content by 2012. While the figure stands at fewer than 12 million worldwide today, in five years that swelling number of users will spend more than $6.6 billion on mobile broadcast television services, the research organization says.
An alliance of U.S. commercial and public broadcasters, called the Open Mobile Video Coalition, is working to accelerate development of a mobile TV standard for broadcasters. The Advanced Television Systems Committee has shifted the standardization process into high gear, calling for and receiving multiple proposals for a mobile and handheld standard.
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