WOIO, the Raycom Media-owned CBS affiliate in Cleveland, OH, has gone live with Bitcentral’s Precis news production and playout solution in its broadcast newsroom.
Raycom is standardizing all of its newsrooms on Bitcentral’s Precis and Oasis solutions, and WOIO is the latest station to employ a Precis-centered workflow. Raycom selected Bitcentral products as its station group standard because of the company’s nonproprietary workflow. This allows stations to scale their systems and integrate with existing hardware and software in each local market.
Operational requirements accelerated WOIO’s installation schedule with little advance notice. Close coordination between the station and Bitcentral resulted in the station being installed and users trained on the new platform only six weeks after the order was placed.
According to WOIO chief engineer Bob Maupin, the station has shared content with other Raycom stations for years via Bitcentral’s Oasis, but it waited to add Precis while other stations in the group integrated it into their news workflow.
WOIO is just the latest Raycom property to go live on Precis 4. The group’s flagship NBC affiliate in the Hawaiian Islands, KHNL on Oahu, installed Precis recently as it upgraded to 1080i HD. KHNL operates in a unique environment; it is collocated in the newsroom of CBS affiliate KGMB, along with KHNL sister station KFVE, a MyNetwork TV affiliate. This newsroom has become the central hub for all three stations, producing more than 40 hours of local news a week using Precis.
