28 NEWS FOCUS Al Jazeera
IT’S A BUSINESS DECISION Al Jazeera partnered with live video control Make.TV to use the cloud to ingest, transport and monitor video from its journalists in the field. In traditional newsrooms, in order to go live from a remote location, it is necessary to arrange for a satellite news gathering (SNG) car, book satellite feeds and schedule the feed for ingest, with a considerable number of people – and dollars – involved in the process. Make.TV’s platform allows for the ingest and capture of any number of concurrent live video feeds via the public internet. Employed by a number of major news, sports and entertainment companies, Make.TV expands the choice of video options available and allows them to be distributed to any outlet. This simpler, cloud-based solution allows a journalist – or multiple journalists – anywhere in the world to send their feed directly to the central production gallery, where it can be ingested or mixed live into a broadcast. “From the business perspective, it’s a huge cost saving,” says Logozar. “And, of course, it dramatically increases the speed of production on the newsroom side.” The cloud ingest system opens up a newsroom’s potential contributors enormously and could expand an organisation’s access to information and quality content. Contributors could be journalists or locals on the scene providing user-generated content (UGC). Its deployment is, as Logozar says, a business decision, rather than a technological one.
QUALITY CONTRIBUTIONS For Make.TV, the important thing is to enable broadcasters, especially news stations, to get access to content fast and to exchange relevant feeds within the organisation, according to Andreas Jacobi, the co-founder and CEO of Make.TV. Jacobi sees this stream-based technology as a complete replacement for satellite in the broadcast ingest workflow. But it may require a boost from improved mobile networks in order for it to reach its true potential. “Satellite might remain relevant when it comes to distribution, but acquisition, routing and exchange through satellite will be replaced,“ he explains. ”Cloud providers are important for that, but the first mile is still the big problem for that. But, once 5G is in place, the quality of contributions should increase rapidly.” Jacobi envisions a future where high- quality video is available from any scene, anywhere, through UGC that naturally rises in quality as the technology improves. “Consumers will be able to crop and stabilise images without a tripod. It will look much more professional. That will enable the production teams in the newsroom to really use these feeds in their original state,” he predicts. As IP streams replace satellite, Jacobi says it makes more and more sense to have newsrooms entirely based in the cloud, enabling much more collaboration between editorial production teams and their collaborators. FUTURE CLOUD The transition to “all-cloud newsrooms” could take up to five years, according SATELLITE MIGHT REMAIN RELEVANT WHEN IT COMES TO DISTRIBUTION, BUT ACQUISITION, ROUTING AND EXCHANGE THROUGH SATELLITE WILL BE REPLACED
to Jacobi. “This transition period will be very interesting,” he says. “In our work with Al Jazeera, the cloud set-ups are not always more cost efficient. Right now, it’s challenging but interesting to find the best hybrid solution – to be able scale up production capacity and be flexible, but also to use existing hardware, bonding solutions and on-premises infrastructure in a way that makes more sense.” The fully cloud-based newsroom will change how content is produced, but it will also change the type of content, too, envisions Jacobi. He believes that news organisations will move from being producers to being curators of content, and the wealth of content available will require new types of creative thinking and new types of content management. “The amount of available content coming from all over the world might require deep learning algorithms to figure out relevant content based on a configuration, which, to me, represents quality. Then the biggest challenge for the newsroom will be to define quality and to define algorithms that will search
SWIFT SOLUTIONS For Al Jazeera’s Miljenko Logozar, a cloud-based solution offers huge cost savings and dramatically increases the speed of production for newsrooms
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