IBC, Amsterdam, Booth 9A01, 9 September 2016: SAM has a strong heritage in fast-turnaround production, its technology has been powering some of the world’s largest news and sports operations for years. At IBC the company is introducing a major update to its news offering providing support for any format of video, ultra-fast editing, automated versioning, and multi-platform publishing.
“Historically news production systems have been focused on specific platforms, for example broadcast television and websites. The production tools have been limited to specific formats, such as 16x9 video. Today breaking news can come from any source and needs to hit multiple platforms at the same time, social media sites, websites, and broadcast. It is simply not efficient enough for News organisations to have multiple processes to support this”, said Trevor Francis, Director of Production Systems at SAM. “What SAM are debuting at IBC allows any content to be natively handled in the story creation process, for example ‘vertical video’ from a mobile phone, if content originates from a phone and is ultimately consumed on a phone why convert it to a 16x9 TV picture in the middle?”
But it’s not just about video formats; SAM is also extending the capabilities of the news system by introducing automated workflows, where complete production processes can be automated to create multiple versions of a story, for example, uniquely styling and branding the output for different platforms.
News production has to be fully mobile and provide the capacity to create finished stories, ready for posting. SAM’s browser-based editors will run on any platform: smartphone, tablet or laptop. Local and remote content can be mixed in a sequence, complete with voice-over and simple effects.
SAM’s News Solution provides easy and secure access to all files, as they arrive. Local and mobile users benefit from the rich, user-definable metadata schema, and customised searches to locate the content they need to complete their story simply and quickly.
Just as important as the content creators are the media managers, archivists and super users. They have everything they need to build and maintain workflows, manage the on-line storage and ensure that all content is archived and easily available for re-use.
Francis adds, “We built our reputation on fast and dependable workflows for the world’s premier News and Sports brands. We’re now taking this to the next level, for fully mobile, file agnostic production for all publishing platforms.”
