Jun 25, 2008 Fox News Goes Tapeless

by Craig Johnston

Craig Johnston is a Seattle-based Internet and multimedia producer with an extensive background in broadcast.

NEW YORKAs Fox News Channel approached its 10th anniversary in 2005, the broadcast facility looked to replace its tape-based news story workflow. While the network could have chosen to go tapeless in a piecemeal manner as other networks had done, it decided to go tapeless end-to-end.

“We’re kind of aggressive here,” said Greg Ahlquist, senior director of Digital Media Production at Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network. With such a radical change from tape to tapeless, stretching from camera and feed acquisition to play-out and deep archive, the network sought help from Media Strategy Partners, a Cos Cob, Conn.-based company that began its life doing digital workflows for sports.

Paul Gudelis, co-founder of MSP, pointed out a number of similarities between news and sports broadcasting, such as their focus on real-time, fast turnaround, and the need for logging and metadata to retrieve material. “Where news is different is that it relies on a very deep archive for background material,” he said.

FOX BUSINESS GOES FIRST

MSP’s first job was to observe FNC’s video tape-based operation, to understand that workflow. “How do you determine that you have enough capacity to duplicate a lot of what you’re doing?” asked Ahlquist. “And how do you change your management enough within the organization so that they all know what they need to know in order to create an efficient workflow and not duplicate efforts?”...

Full Story: TV Technology

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