feature live news & sport Feature sponsored by
For most major broadcasters, news is probably the most strategically important programming type. It is one area in which a station can stamp its personality on its output, and delivering high quality news with clarity and character is a proven way to build brand loyalty in an increasingly commoditised market. Ed Casaccia, senior marketing director at Grass Valley, reports.
A new newsroom architecture N
ews can be expensive, demanding skilled staff in newsgathering and in producing programmes in the studio. Today, we must add the
requirement of delivering multimedia content to mobile phones, tablets, and the web. All of this must be done against huge time pressures: one of the key performance indicators in news is being first to air with a story as well as covering it accurately and comprehensively. Inevitably, there is great interest in
Ed Casaccia, senior marketing director at Grass Valley.
technology to automate the routine parts of the workflow, and to ease the load where the processes are dependent upon skilled staff. The industry has responded, first with newsroom computers which handled the words, and later with production systems which brought together the video clips, graphics, voiceovers, and so on. Today these are commonly linked
by means of an open interface - usually the Media Object Server (MOS) protocol - which broadly keeps the two in synchronisation by means of pre-defined rules. While this is now routinely made to work in broadcast newsrooms, it might seem cumbersome to have two independent, mission critical software systems which have to tell each other what they are doing. This is not necessarily so. The suggestion to bring them
together in a single system is gaining weight, and the logic behind this initially appears sound. But, the temptation to simply bundle everything we have today into one big application must be resisted. First, and most obvious, combining the newsroom computer with the
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news production system doubles the risk by creating a massive single point of failure. Such a combined system is likely to be extremely bloated, placing a big drain on resources and very difficult to manage in terms of data bandwidths. A single system, at least as we
understand it today, implies a complex point-to-point architecture. If each workstation has to talk to each device there are a huge number of interface points. Changes to any element of the software - and remember that devices in a best-of-breed solution will come from a number of vendors - may mean changes to these interface points, resulting in unpredictable instability across the entire system. In an era when we are trying to run
systems with less technical support, implementing something that will be a nightmare to manage and maintain seems a very retrograde step. We need a new approach.
Service oriented architecture
The IT-industry has been reaping the benefits of service oriented architecture (SOA) for quite some
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