News and sports programming, which are the biggest drivers for broadcast revenue and audiences, were also the central topic of the first panel at the TV Tech Summit, where executives at stations and networks discussed newer technologies that are helping them engage viewers and streamline operations.
When asked about the future of technologies for news and sports, panelists were particularly bullish on advances in virtual sets, remote production, standardized interoperable solutions, hybrid cloud archives and infrastructures that help streamline the delivery to multiple platforms.
During the panel, “New Tech for the Next Generation of News and Sports” Tim Hinson vice president, technology, at ABC13 KTRK in Houston Texas at the ABC Owned Television Stations, stressed that a key tech priority at the station group has been to standardize and centralize technologies. This, he said, has helped them improve quality and more efficiently produce massive amount of local news each week.
That effort, he added, also produced a number of important benefits during the L.A. wildfires.
“Over the past few years, we've been really focusing on technology and operations, centralization and standardization,” he said, adding that he wasn’t “necessarily referring to just a people or a hub, for example, even though we do some of that. Really what we're talking about is centralization of technology [in terms of] reducing costs and also workflow optimization. And we're also hyper focused on making sure our common systems and workflows are standardized across the group, especially from a technology perspective, because that really, really promotes the sharing of data, content and personnel.”
Covering Wildfires with Better Tech
During the wildfires, he explained, “a lot of our other stations sent reporters, photographers and other support staff to L.A. to help out with the coverage….Because of our standardization efforts mentioned earlier, people were able to jump right in and begin working…We were able to easily provide live shots to any station around the country from any bonded cell packing unit with just a touch of a button.”
They were also able to get them working without having to “learn the station systems first…They were just able to go straight out in the field and start contributing right away,” he said.
Hinson and the other panelists also stressed the importance of engaging viewers with new ways of telling stories that can help them stand out from a crowded news and sports landscape.
One example of that is virtual sets or augmented reality technologies.
Jason Wormser, senior vice president, CW Sports noted that their production partner NASCAR Productions has recently unveiled a new virtual set in Studio 43, their state-of-the-art production facility that NASCAR uses to produce the CW NASCAR coverage.
“They’ve invested in a 57 foot LED wall,” he said. “They are using AR camera tracking technology with a [ARRI] Alexa 35 studio camera system…We really think this is kind of the next stage, the next step of these virtual systems" that will provide enormous flexibility and quality for the studio production.”
During the panel, Scott Warren, president and general manager, CBS Bay Area (KPIX/KPIX+) discussed a ground-breaking case study of how the CBS-owned stations were able to deploy virtual sets, which until relatively recently, required the kind of large budgets and engineering staff that only large networks could afford.
Warren said the project began in 2023 as part of a push to find better ways to tell stories and provide better, more engaging weather coverage. “We wanted to make an immersive experience, because weather is more than two dimensional,” he explained. “It's more than a person in front of a map, it's cloud stacks, it's elevation, it's wind, it's rain, it’s precipitation…We felt like we could tell the weather story in a better way in an immersive environment, and that's where this all started.”
In the development process of the system, they worked with Myreze, a branding and virtual production company from Norway. Other vendors included Zero Density’s virtual solution, rendering from the Unreal Engine, camera tracking from stYpe and Baron Weather for integrated weather data.
The Secret Sauce for Immersive Local News
A key component, however, was their inhouse tech talent, Warren stressed. “We had to challenge them [all the vendors], as well as ourselves, because we couldn't add bodies…We really had to do it with the existing team…We had to do something different and bring all of this in house and have it hook up into an automated control room with just one director.”
"And…that was the where the secret sauce comes in, [the station’s inhouse tech talent],” he added. “Our coders and our engineers have worked feverishly to pull all the pieces and parts [together] and to get inside all of the third party vendors’ engines and reconfigure things to make it work.”
The result, he said, is “TV in a box. We've created a system that does work with just one director driving the whole thing, and one operator, and that's it.”
The system is so streamlined they’ve been able to since install it at other CBS owned stations in New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, Colorado and Miami. It has also been expanded for additional types of coverage, including breaking news and sports, with the CBS stations using it for their March Madness Coverage.
In San Francisco, they’ve become so comfortable with the solution that they’ve discarded all the hard sets.
The system is particularly appealing for breaking news. “The magic of the weather system is that everything is in real time and real time data,” Warren said. “The big challenge at the very beginning of building this was, how do we bring all that weather data from the National Weather Service and other partners into our system at every single elevation in the atmosphere, to show every different kind of condition, pressure, wind, precipitation and temperature, all the things that factor into what makes weather. How do we bring that digital information into the system in real time and create the visual representations of what that is doing?”
The resulting system “does exactly that,” he explained. “It builds graphics in real time.”
This has also been important for breaking news like wildfires. “We're able to watch fires and fire lines develop with these virtual maps,” he said, adding that it has also been a great tool for covering “earthquakes...We're able to locate and show the magnitude as it ripples out across an area, and all of this is driven by the meteorologists in real time who have an iPad.”
The Remote Production Game
During the panel, CW’s Wormser also highlighted the growing importance of remote production tech advances in cutting the costs of sports production.
“Our system is a little bit different than everybody else's, because we are using third parties,” that are producing events for us,” Wormser explained, using remote production technologies. “With REMI, with COVID…it just accelerated so many things in our business [so that remote production]...is kind of the next step” in sports production.
Wormser noted that remote productions have given them more flexibility in the way they’ve produced events, while reducing costs and freeing up money to improve the productions.
“It just saves so much, and it also gives you flexibility in the future of trying new things, trying different ideas, spending more time on pre-produced or post-produced elements,” he said. “It gives you a little bit more flexibility at a lower cost.”
“All the networks are doing it,” he added. “ESPN has been doing it with basketball. Fox has been doing this for years…It goes back into the early 2000s basically, they were bringing games in from across the world, and they were voicing and doing all the graphics in their studios in Los Angeles, and calling him off the monitor because they don't have the money to go around the world. So it's only going to get better. The technology is unbelievable, and will enable networks to put the money into rights and yet still have high quality, innovative production and content for the viewers.”
The full TV Tech Summit, including this panel and keynotes, can be viewed on demand here.
