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“IP connectivity and the cloud have become crucial to everyday workflows, providing the scalability and accessibility needed to take more of a story-centric approach to news production and address the multichannel consumption habits of today’s audiences. Complex tasks such as reformatting and tagging are now being simplified, so creating and distributing media content across multiple channels at once is becoming easier – from news channels and streaming platforms to social media and podcasts.” At Reuters, Sony’s Hive news production platform lets bureaux around the world collaborate on stories across different time zones. “In the past, news production has often been quite siloed,” reveals Rob Lang, global production editor at Thomson Reuters. “You have a team in a bureau with the infrastructure around them, producing content and sending it into the centre.” Aside from the obvious costs and complexity of building and maintaining disparate systems, this fragmentation can cause bottlenecks both for dispersed journalists and any production teams wishing to access and share content. “We wanted to move away from the idea of having satellites and a centre to create a global newsroom, where once content has been
shot, it’s immediately available for everyone who needs it to start working on,” explains Lang. “That’s why we went for a cloud-based production system.” The Hive system allows Reuters news crews on the ground to focus on getting the story and shooting the content, without worrying about the ‘bureaucracy’ of metadata tagging, creating scripts, verification etc, and quickly feeding it into the global newsroom for immediate use. Championing sports An equally eager adopter of the cloud is sports. As part of a larger cloud migration, for example, Sky built a software-defined encoding (SDE) platform based on Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service. It replaced three separate, on-premises, appliance- based pipelines used by Sky teams in the UK, Italy and Germany to prepare content for distribution to a wide range of channels (satellite, terrestrial, OTT etc), which were proving cumbersome and expensive. “Handing off Kubernetes cluster management to AWS allows our team to focus more time on the video application layer,” remarks Davide Gandino, Sky’s head of group distribution. “We’re also able to pay only for the tools we’re using, which is huge. We can scale up and down in minutes, which is very cost-efficient and allows us to quickly execute new ideas. For instance, we can prepare hundreds of different camera angles for audience consumption, as we recently did with Formula One.”
» Complex tasks such as reformatting and tagging are now being simplified, so creating and distributing media content across multiple channels at once is becoming easier «
CLOUD TO CROWD Sony’s focus on story-centric workflows addresses modern news consumption habits
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