The News Heard 'Round The World

With thirty-two news bureaus around the world feeding into nine distinct channels from finance to sports, Cable News Network (CNN) is the preferred source of news for most people. Even world leaders and heads of state from around the globe turn to CNN for up-to-the-minute news reports on local, national and international events. In only 15 years, through a combination of tenacity and forward thinking, CNN has become the leader in broadcast news.

With the emergence of other 24-hour broadcasters and the Internet, staying the leader in news broadcast proves to be a difficult task. TV networks have to shorten time to air, handle more information and reduce production costs-all in an environment of significantly stiffer competition for viewers' attention.

The CNN Challenge

Providing CNN staffers simultaneous access to the massive amounts of video pouring into the eight Atlanta-based news divisions became a daunting task. Each division (CNN, CNN International and Headline News, etc.) had separate feeds and separate operations. Effort was duplicated as bureaus often gathered similar or identical stories separately. CNN's editors and technicians found themselves overwhelmed by more than 150 hours of news feeds every day.

The situation was, quite simply, "chaotic," as CNN's Vice President of Research and Development, Kevin Ivey, put it. With journalists having to share single-source material, the tapes usually had to be reproduced in triplicate. More often than not, a writer needed a tape that had been checked out by an editor. A pool of production assistants was required to literally run hundreds of tapes to different journalists for review. "It was a regular marathon to get video looked at around here," recalled Ivey.

CNN decided to take innovative steps to secure their leadership in the new environment. "We needed to change the workflow in a way that would make us more competitive and allow us to provide better content," said Ivey.

CNN Boldly Explores the Digital Frontier

Streamlining the workflow would mean consolidating the nine news divisions into a centralized headquarters. But in their quest to stay on the competitive and technological edge, CNN still faced a major problem: how to centralize operations yet give immediate access of video content to hundreds of journalists simultaneously?

CNN s response to this challenge was to convert their analog, tape-based facility in Atlanta to a consolidated MPEG-2, server-based one. Digitizing would mean that journalists would have immediate access to and control of the same raw video-lowering costs of production and speeding up time to air.

But one dilemma still remained: how to quickly locate and retrieve the right segments of video from all that content? To solve this puzzle, CNN turned to Virage's VideoLogger™ software. "Virage offered the only complete processing solution that could handle the massive amount of media processed by CNN," according to Ivey. "We were confident that partnering with Virage and implementing the VideoLogger would ensure the success of our media centralization project."

In CNN's new system, called Mediasource, 32 satellite feeds go to one central point at CNN headquarters. Each feed is "ingested" by the VideoLogger software, which simultaneously indexes the video during the encoding process. The information-rich index is saved to an Informix media asset management system and the video to an SGI MediaBase video server. Within seconds, more than 300 journalists at any desktop in CNN headquarters can simultaneously view the same video. Using the index to search and browse the video, they work with the content to create more robust news stories.

Once the desired raw content has been located, it will be edited, indexed and stored in Leitch ASC high-resolution video servers for direct play out to air. Here, the VideoLogger index will allow producers and journalists to quickly review cut content for reuse in future news stories.

"The VideoLogger drastically reduces the time it takes to view footage," concluded Ivey. "We will have the ability to look at the keyframe storyboards of feeds and tell at a glance what the content is. We will be able to perform multi-level searches rather than having to do a flat file search. We'll have the advantage of searching based on search context and time code. It revolutionizes the way we use content in the newsroom."

The Virage Advantage

Everything journalists need to script a story is accessible. "Scripting news stories used to require a lot of sleuthing on my part about what was actually available visually from our bureau feeds," according to Mark Leff, CNN journalist. "With the VideoLogger, I can call up the media myself at my desktop and ensure that scripts match the media. This makes for more accurate and compelling news stories."

With the VideoLogger in place, journalists have more control over the complete story. Rather than sending text-only scripts to the edit bay, they send near frame-accurate edit decision lists or simple batch digitization lists. This step alone is saving CNN almost 30 percent in their editing costs, the most expensive step in the story creation process. Production assistance support also has been reduced by nearly 70 percent because there is no need to manually search videotape libraries. Information that was buried in the video library is now accessible and can be reused quickly and easily.

More Innovation To Come

As CNN continues implementation of their digital restructuring, research of and access to archived materials will be simplified as well. CNN will be digitizing over 100,000 hours of archived material. Instead of having to guess about when material was sent in, users will be able to just decide what kind of content they want and quickly locate the right footage. Additionally, request processing will be cut in half and will enable self-service stock footage sales over the Internet. With advertising budgets fixed, expanding other revenue sources is crucial to improving CNN's business.

The Bottom Line

While few news organizations rival the size or complexity of CNN s operations, all broadcasters face the same challenges: lowering production costs, quickly and easily accessing media, speeding up time to air and discovering new revenue opportunities. Fully scalable and easy to integrate, Virage products are affordable for even the smallest news organization. Call Virage today for more information on how we can improve your bottom line.