Techniques used in newsgathering have changed substantially in the past 20 years, and the same is true for live production. The same mobile technology that shapes what we carry in our pockets has made it faster and easier than ever to cover a breaking news story across town.
News and live-production operations have embraced mobile technology with a vengeance, and it is now widely used across the industry. And every year at the NAB Show, there are sleeker, faster and more capable products.
Staying Connected
Everything hinges on the word “faster,” as we want our news to be right now. The broadcaster who wins the “right now” race is probably the broadcaster that gets the most views.
“With the proliferation of news websites, apps, and social media, audiences expect updates to be shared almost in real-time,” said Matt Scully, director of product management at Dejero. “For film, television and commercial production, teams can leverage a reliable, ultra-fast connection to enable real-time collaboration with dispersed teams and accelerate delivery of content from the set directly to post-production, regardless of location—thus reducing the number of people required on set, and unlocking huge cost-savings.”
Scully pointed out that Dejero’s EnGo 3x with GateWay mode lets news crews broadcast breaking stories, quickly transfer files to prepare and upload packages while in the field, and set up high-bandwidth access points for multiple devices.
With the ability to get signals on the air quickly comes an increasing number of signal sources. Selecting among sources that grow in number can quickly cause a broadcaster to outgrow its source switcher, so TVU Networks will be showing its new solution: TVU MediaHub. MediaHub accepts various input formats ranging from SDI, NDI, SRT and TVU Grid to YouTube and more. It can scale and direct outputs to multiple destinations in formats such as RTMP, HLS, TVU Grid and Facebook. MediaHub can be scaled up or down as needed, and charged by the minute as it is used.
“We’re eager to see how this platform will enable content creators and broadcasters to innovate and engage their audiences in novel, exciting ways,” said Paul Shen, CEO of TVU. “MediaHub is a portal to endless broadcasting possibilities.”
Election Coverage
LiveU will be at the NAB Show demonstrating techniques for election coverage, as well as the company’s latest cloud remote production and sports workflows. The LiveU booth will also host several sessions from leading LiveU EcoSystem partners covering a range of contemporary use cases and workflows, including cloud-remote production, content aggregation and AI-augmented production.
“This will be a record-breaking year for live IP-video, with a very strong roster of global sports events, dozens of elections and other high-profile events all contributing to its growth,” said Steve Wind-Mozley, chief marketing officer at LiveU. “Everything we will showcase at the NAB Show is designed to shorten workflows by reducing complexity and effort, and to add efficiency.”
Virtual studios can make a small space seem much bigger—and the same space can be news one moment, the weather report next and sports after that. Making it all work seamlessly in a live production is the key to virtual production.
ENCO will highlight its Qimera live virtual production and augmented-reality solution for broadcast and production studios. Qimera simplifies the complexities of virtual studio production, enabling broadcasters and content creators to produce immersive content with ease.
“This year, we will highlight how broadcasters can utilize Qimera for augmented reality in addition to virtual production,” said Ken Frommert, president of ENCO. “We will also debut an AI-generated virtual anchor within a 3D space. This is an example of how Qimera blends the physical and digital worlds.”
ENCO will also debut enCaption Sierra, an automated turnkey encoding and captioning system, made possible through ENCO’s recent acquisitions of DoCaption, according to Frommert.
“There will be new features for Sierra that push the boundaries of what has been possible in captioning, and these will be announced closer to NAB. However, we are packing Sierra into an all-in-one system that includes a closed-captioned encoder along with live, automatic captioning software.”
Cloud Environment
EditShare will feature its cloud production and editing service called FLEX, including FLEX Cloud Edit and FLEX Cloud Sync. FLEX Cloud Edit provides media asset management, software-defined storage, and virtual workstations in a cloud environment provided by AWS. FLEX provides a completely open hosting environment, so users are free to use whatever editing software they prefer.
Collecting the news for a local station used to be done entirely in-house, using microwave trucks that beamed a narrow signal back to a dish on a tower at the station. Similarly, live production frequently used satellite uplink trucks to transmit a signal that was received on a big dish at the station—as much as possible, the signal and its processing was kept in-house. That way the engineering department and management could be sure that the station had as much control over the signal path as possible.
In the past 10 to 15 years, that has all changed. Now, news remotes usually use public cellular carriers to send the signals over the internet, often shipping them to cloud facilities for storage and/or processing. Today it is possible to produce a newscast in the cloud with only some anchor feeds coming from the station’s studio.
And don’t be surprised if even that changes in the next couple of years.
Register for the 2024 NAB Show, April 14-17 in Las Vegas at https://nabshow.com/2024/
