Southfield, MIand Prague, Czech Republic,July 27,2018 – Radio and television automation innovator ENCO and newsroom computer system (NRCS) specialist Octopus Newsroom have partnered to streamline news production and playout workflows for broadcasters worldwide. Leveraging the two companies’ robust support for the Media Object Server (MOS) protocol, seamless integration between their respective solutions eliminates disruptive workflow barriers to let journalists focus on creating compelling, informative stories.
The integration will be highlighted at the IBC2018 exhibition, where ENCO will exhibit at stand 8.A59 and Octopus will showcase its solutions in stand 7.A39.
ENCO’s MOS-enabled ActiveX plugin enables journalists and news producers to access ENCO asset libraries directly within the Octopus client interface. Users can search the ENCO library, preview clips, trim media as needed, and bring the results into their stories by simply dragging and dropping the desired items. Building on the Octopus software’s ability to combine multiple media elements within each story, the integration allows journalists to easily incorporate library assets including graphics, audio and video into their scripts.
Avoiding the need for producers to manually push rundowns, running order changes in the Octopus NRCS are automatically reflected in the ENCO automation system. The Octopus software can then trigger the ENCO system via the MOS protocol to play out the assets.
While the integration was initially qualified for radio broadcasters using Octopus Newsroom with ENCO’s DAD audio automation system, the same MOS Gateway interface is used in ENCO’s MOM (Media Operations Manager) television automation platform – thus enabling a similarly efficient workflow for Octopus-powered TV news organizations.
“Working with ENCO to integrate our solutions was a true pleasure,” said Milan Varga, Technology Partners Manager at Octopus Newsroom. “Other integrations we’ve done have often been a bit clunky initially and needed a lot of development refinements, but the integration between ENCO and Octopus worked almost seamlessly right out of the box with only minor configuration adjustments. This shows that ENCO follows the MOS specifications very closely and has kept up to date with advances in the MOS protocol. The result seamlessly bridges news production and playout to make operation easy for journalists.”
“We continue to expand our ecosystem of third-party integrations to let customers flexibly choose exactly the right solutions for their needs,” said Ken Frommert, President of ENCO. “Octopus offers a strong NRCS solution and has built a solid international market presence, particularly in Asia and Europe. Our new partnership and integration let existing and future Octopus radio and television clients easily take advantage of the benefits of our full-featured automation solutions.”
ENCO MOM offers television broadcasters, cable operators and streaming media providers a comprehensive, reliable and cost-effective platform for organizing, managing and automating critical production and integrated channel playout tasks. ENCO DAD provides radio broadcasters with a powerful and flexible audio playout automation, control and management system that ensures reliable, accurate delivery of audio content on time, every time.
Octopus 8.1 is a powerful, innovative newsroom computer system designed for use by television, radio, sports and esports broadcasters. The software facilitates editorial collaboration between news team members at every stage of the newscast production process, and goes beyond broadcast by providing tools to publish content to the web and social media channels from a single platform.
About ENCO
Founded in 1983, ENCO pioneered the use of computer-based, digital audio and program automation for radio station and TV studios. The company has since evolved its product line to cross all aspects of today’s automated broadcast and production workflows, including closed-captioning, visual radio, audio compliance, instant media playout, remote contribution, and cloud-based web streaming. Its two flagship systems, DAD and MOM, bring the industry’s best reliability, cost-efficiency and intuitive operation to automated radio and TV operations worldwide. ENCO is headquartered in Southfield, Michigan USA and retains a global distribution network, plus a growing network of partnerships with complementary industry vendors. For more information, please visit: www.enco.com.
About Octopus Newsroom
Established in 1999, Octopus Newsroom (www.octopus-news.com) is the leading producer of standalone newsroom computer systems. Octopus Newsroom advocates an open ecosystem using the MOS protocol which enables customers to choose freely among high-quality providers of graphics, playout, MAM, prompters, traffic-handing and advertising solutions. Octopus Newsroom has successfully installed systems into more than 220 channels around the world. Based on Unicode, Octopus Newsroom products support all major character sets including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese.
