It wasn’t all that long ago that most TV newsrooms relied on a person in the feed room to manage recording all of the incoming raw footage, news packages and other content transmitted to stations so reporters and editors could create stories and producers could build newscasts.
Someone in that room knew which satellite or microwave feed would be arriving at what time via which router output so that news content could be recorded on a designated tape machine. Tapes then were shuffled to the journalists and producers who needed them to write and edit stories. Eventually, those stories made air on the 6 or 11 o’clock news, and the cycle began once again.
But those halcyon days of TV news are long gone. Today’s newsroom is far more than a “television newsroom.” In many instances, it’s the hub of a 24/7 news operation that creates and distributes newscasts and stories 10 or more hours a day on air across multiple channels and around the clock via websites and social media.
With this transformation has come increasing complexity in managing incoming feeds. Not only has the number of feeds skyrocketed, but also the variety of signal formats used. While SDI feeds abound, many additional formats, codecs and signal types are in play as well, making transcoding to a house format essential.
At the same time, newsrooms have transformed old workflows to meet the challenge of 24/7 news operations, looking to achieve greater efficiencies and enhance productivity. Many have replaced the “feed room dude” of old with a workflow that enables anybody with permission in the newsroom to grab a feed, begin working with it and share that feed with multiple people.
Recognizing these evolving workflow requirements, Ross Video designed its Media I/O specifically to support modern newsrooms. The solution enables newsrooms to unify all of their ingest and playout channels in the same control interface.
Those in the newsroom can access feeds via Media I/O’s web UI from their laptops and workstations. In essence, Media I/O brings the feed room directly into the newsroom and places it on the desks of journalists who can ingest footage, play it out in real-time in any format and incorporate desired clips into their stories.
Reporters and others in the newsroom can control ingest and playout from their preferred web browser and access ingested assets, eliminating unnecessary, repetitive recordings of the same content by different people.
Media I/O supports most broadcast file formats, such as ProRes, XDCAM, DNxHD, AVC-Intra, XAVC, DVCPRO HD, HEVC and H.264, including growing files, as well as software-driven IP workflows like SMPTE ST 2110, NDI and SRT. Media IP works natively with baseband and network sources, such as SDI, HLS, MPEG DASH and RTSP.
The system also offers a visual schedular with a calendar-based timeline to enable users to manage and visualize upcoming recordings. Media I/O can be deployed on premises, cloud hosted as a virtualized system or as a hybrid to meet the individual preferences of media organizations.
These are only a few of the many features that make the Ross Video Media I/O a key enabler for modern newsroom workflows. Many others are in the works. For example, expect to see at the 2025 NAB Show a new feature for Media I/O’s web UI that allows users to open an asset in a web browser and view it as a proxy video, not simply as a thumbnail as in previous versions.
Media I/O enables newsrooms to allow anyone they want to be their own feed dudes, giving them access to and control over the signal sources they need to create news content more efficiently. With Media I/O, the feed dude is dead. Long live the feed dudes!
See Ross Video and the Media I/O at the 2025 NAB Show in booth SL206.
Click here to learn more about the Ross Video Media I/O.
