feature content distribution


It is a given today that broadcasters will need to take their television news content and repurpose and repackage it for other platforms. Certainly this will be for the web, and increasingly broadcasters are developing special services for tablets, like the iPad and Android devices, as well as for varied smartphone platforms. Scott Matics, product manager at Grass Valley, reports.


Preparing content for multi-platform delivery


hese services may be a way of building and retaining audience loyalty through the ubiquity of the brand. Now, new revenue opportunities are developing, including highly tailored advertising and subscription models, which make what were originally secondary outputs for the content into primary delivery points which demonstrate a real return.


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Whatever the business model, though, it hardly needs stating that, in today’s highly competitive world, the delivery of content to multiple platforms has to be accomplished with little or no increase in head count or operating expenditure. How can this be reconciled with the need to actively repurpose the content, both editorially and technically?


The material itself may need to be re-edited. Some stories may be better run longer online, shorter on mobile devices. There may be rights issues: a


MediaFUSE: the original version was designed as a companion product to the Grass Valley Ignite integrated production system, and a significant number of broadcasters worldwide are using this


combination. But in recognition that the requirement for repurposing is common to all broadcasters, whatever


production system they are using for news, Grass Valley has developed an open version of the same technology, MediaFUSE FX.


broadcaster could have access to a sports event for broadcast highlights but not the Internet.


Technically, each output will require a different format. Each device has its own optimum resolution, and each platform has a preferred codec and wrapper. Apple’s choice is H.264, while Google and many others still embrace Flash. In the future HTML 5 may take the problem away, which only serves to underline the challenge: this is a constantly shifting situation. Finally, publishing on other platforms is not just about transcoding the essence. It has to be combined with the appropriate metadata. First, this is vital to tell the downstream systems how to interpret the data stream. Second, packed metadata also drives search engine optimisation, ensuring that casual viewers will find your version of the story rather than that from your competitor.


The trend in television newsrooms is to hand sole responsibility for a story to the journalist, giving them the tools to edit and publish it on the desktop. The reasons that make this the logical solution - the journalist knows best how to tell the story - make it equally logical to hand them the responsibility for distributing it to other platforms.


The key question is how technology can provide the underlying platform which allows the journalist to distribute to every appropriate


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platform, without adding significantly to the workload which would divert him or her from the task in hand: identifying the next big story.


MediaFUSE


The Grass Valley solution is a proven product called MediaFUSE. The original version was designed as a companion product to the Grass Valley Ignite integrated production system, and a significant number of broadcasters worldwide are using this combination. But in recognition that the requirement for repurposing is common to all broadcasters, whatever production system they are using for news, we have developed an open version of the same technology, MediaFUSE FX. This uses industry standard interfaces to connect with other devices, and provides broadly the same functionality, minus the automated content replacement in the live stream.


MediaFUSE ingests the video for each story then prompts the journalist to add the required additional information. Much of this will come from pre-prepared templates, with the journalist simply adding the text version of the story. Categorisation, standard background information and publishing details are added automatically to pre-populate the metadata.


Tools in the workstation allow the


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