The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awarded The Associated Press a patent for a method of “automatic selection of encoding parameters for transmission of media objects,” a technology that underpins AP’s SNAPfeed application for field reporting, the company said last week.
Initially developed at the beginning of the second Gulf War, SNAPfeed translates a field reporter’s answers to a few questions into a series of complex actions that automatically compress and get video back to a newsroom to meet a deadline. Hiding technical distractions, the combination of editorial information, variable bandwidth and computer performance determines how best to proceed using optimized transmission protocols.
SNAPfeed is an add-on to AP’s ENPS information management and news production system.
