THE EXPERTS
Ross Tanner, director of new business and sales, Magnifi
Simon Browne, vice president of product management, Clear-Com
VERITY BUTLER: How would you define automation in the context of broadcast tech?
Paul Charleston, principal, Qvest
PETER ABECASSIS: Automation is a big word that means a lot of things to a lot of different people. Any solution that really saves effort for the user could be considered to be automation. Specifically in broadcast, I think of automation as a way to take a bunch of complex steps that are required to produce video and replicate them in an automatic way. Make them more repeatable, more consistent and maybe even do more than what an individual human would normally be able to do. PAUL CHARLESTON: Automation is the answer to budgets. If you had infinite people, infinite skilled workers to do every minor interaction, you wouldn’t need as much automation. The reality is that television budgets are squeezed. Everyone needs to do more with less. Look at content such as sports needing automatic highlights, newsrooms needing automatic cut- down of three- to four-hour events
– even repurposing and creating versioning internationally with multi- language. All of these workflows need to be happening faster and repeatedly – and without a huge stable of people to do it. SIMON BROWNE: I agree with all of that. Automation appeals to the broadcasters, that they can see the workflow in their own terms and automate it in a way that they understand. Automation equates to making the complex simple. ROSS TANNER: I come at it from the other side in a sense that the audiences are now very much fragmented across different
Peter Abecassis, director of product management, Ross Video
THE MODERATOR
platforms. The emergence of different social platforms and
different content that needs to be served up 24/7. I think that’s the main reason why workflows in traditional broadcasting need to use automation, because it’s no longer just linear broadcasting, it’s now serving needs across digital, OTT and social.
Verity Butler, editor, FEED
@feedzinesocial
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