This is an online video delivery platform allowing digital publishers to deliver broadcast- quality news. It was developed to allow nontraditional customers to access news content without having to invest in large scale infrastructure. The platform allows customers access to video news created by AP’s journalists in the field, directly at their client desk- tops. It is also designed to cater for the growing demand for live news online. There has always been a strong appetite from the traditional marketplace for live and now publishers in the digital space, from websites to tablet apps, have noticeably shifted toward live.
How has AP met the demand for HD? Earlier this year we completed a full migration to HD. We replaced our infrastructure from field cameras through to production systems and delivery technologies
and the archive. We want to ensure delivery of HD pictures at a high quality and yet remain competitive, from a speed point of view. We deliver in MPEG-4 which has several advantages and we hope others will follow our example. We wanted to adopt something that was uniform across the industry and something easily transcoded into the house standards of our customers who have their own particular formats in use.
What impact is user -generated or citizen journalism having? There is a definite desire for people to submit video content related to news events and a growing demand from broad- casters and websites to consume that content. But if you are a smaller TV station, how do you know it is accurate or genuine? AP has strengthened its editorial teams to focus on validating content and we have partnered with people to help us aggregate it. CG