Simon Haywood Broadcast Consulting | Digital Media Infrastructure For Live News

Digital Media Infrastructure

Demands of a television newsroom are like no other. Those who make programs we watch, need to work with and share media from multiple and varied sources. They need to edit, play-to-air, and archive that material and need to both gather and author the content. It is a tough task, and the tools to do the job need to be functional, reliable, and ready to work.

Delivering those tools is an equally tough task. Even in the not-so-distant past, the only way of getting a news program on the air was to build a station around discrete islands of analog technology, using a token-based workflow, and rely on manual intervention. The path, ‘from glass to glass' (the camera to the television screen) involved many steps, with the token (a video tape containing media) being passed between people and machines.

The end of the 20th century brought developments in technology that enabled those discrete islands to be upgraded to new digital versions. Still though, the technology was very much proprietary. Be it a video server, a graphics device, or an editing system, each item in the chain was a ‘black box' with only baseband video and audio interfaces. Slowly, manufacturers, integrators, and broadcasters found ways to bring the technologies together - building bridges to join the islands. The ultimate goal was to bring together processes; implement a workflow that did away with the token, and gave those making our television news programs the space and freedom to do just that.

This article was first published by India's Broadcast & Cable Sat Magazine in 2009, and can be read in full at Broadcast & Cable Sat Magazine's website.