Broadcast Solutions

Published by Emil Abraham, April 15th, 2019

The media and broadcasting industry is growing at the breathtaking speed. The industry players are facing challenges to manage their technological processes, keeping their advertising revenues high and maintain their lead across different delivery platforms. Today, radio and television services understand the importance of staying relevant by tuning out inefficiencies and maximizing customer engagement in their business.

Over-the-Top players are giving serious threat to traditional broadcasters, who own rights for major sports events, and other entertainment shows. Netflix, Amazon, Fb, and Apple are competing with each other for sports event broadcasting rights. These brand players are targeting millennial population and retro generation who are hooked to their mobile phones. Various sports events like premier leagues of cricket, NBA, football, and others attract millions of viewers across the globe. So, aforementioned ecommerce giants have started making big investments to secure rights for these events. For example – Amazon Prime is all set to rule the OTT market in 2018, similarly FB Live is all set to make an impact with its video experiments. It is planning to engage and inspire its customer base to buy event packages for mobile viewing. Thus, OTT giants are experimenting with brand loyalty programs, which improves their customer base, as well as revenues.

Electronic News Production System (ENPS) is a software application developed by the Associated Press' Broadcast Technology division for producing, editing, timing, organizing and running news broadcasts. The system is scalable and flexible enough to handle anything from the local news at a small-market station to large organizations spanning remote bureaus in multiple countries.

The basic organization of each news broadcast is called a "rundown" (US) or "running order" (UK). The run-down is a grid listing scripts, video, audio, character generator data, teleprompter control, director notations, camera operator cues, and timing estimates for each section of the broadcast.

ENPS integrates scripts, wire feeds, device control, and production information in a server/client environment. On the server side, ENPS runs an identical backup server (called a "buddy") at all times as a fail-safe. If the primary server fails, all users are redirected to the buddy server until such time as the primary comes back on-line. All document changes are queued on the buddy and copied back to the primary automatically when it returns to production. Note that this is not a mirror server as the changed data is copied to the buddy, but there is no direct replication inherent within the intercommunications between the servers, so if the data is corrupted due to hardware failure on one server, this corruption will not be replicated to the "buddy".

Device control can be managed either through a serial interface, or the MOS (Media Object Server) protocol. MOS functionality is included in the base ENPS license, but may be an extra add-on for the device that needs to interface with ENPS. MOS items such as video or audio clips can be added directly to scripts, and then used by third party software and devices during the broadcast. Many broadcast media systems support the MOS protocol to a greater or lesser degree by implementing any of the seven MOS Protocol 'profiles'. An example of a MOS System which fully supports all seven MOS Profiles is SIENNA , used by ENPS customers including the BBC.

What is iNEWS?

Working together with infrastructure such as Avid Interplay, the iNEWS server lets users create and deliver breaking news, unify entire newsroom operations, and engage audiences across a broad spectrum of TV, web, mobile and social media channels. iNEWS supports all standard wire formats such as ANPA, IPTC, and News ML and allows the consolidated ingest of wires and other sources via serial feed, telnet, email, or by monitoring directories. The iNEWS interface provides a multipurpose front end. Here users can preview videos associated with Avid Interplay sequences directly within iNEWS, perform forward searches across multiple iNEWS systems, and communicate with the rest of the news team.

Journalists can create, browse and edit stories while directly connected to the iNEWS system at the station, but can also work remotely, accessing news content and rundowns via a realtime Interplay Central browser-based interface or using the mobile workflow of Interplay Central native iPad and iPhone apps.

TV and New Media

There is always a question about what "new media" is. It is a term we hear frequently. When the European Broadcast Union recognized that its members did not understand the definitions, it worked with those members to define the term. The organization’s basic question was, how can we distinguish television from the new media? The organization adopted two basic terms: linear service and nonlinear service.

Television is considered a linear service—that is, the broadcasting of a program where the network or station decides when the program will be offered, no matter what distribution platform is used. Although there are many new distribution platforms (satellite, broadband Internet, iPod/PDA, and the cell phone), if television uses the platform, it is a linear service.

On the other hand, the nonlinear services equal the new media, which means making programs available for on-demand delivery. For instance, video-on-demand can use any platform. It is the demand that makes the difference.