GRASS VALLEY AIMS TO MAKE WEB, MOBILE EASIER

Most TV stations are eager to post the stories they produce for live newscasts on the Web and to distribute them through mobile outlets as soon as they can.

But chopping up newscasts into Web- or mobile-ready clips is a chore, requiring hours of work for a station employee.

Hoping to meet the demand for a simpler, faster way is Grass Valley.

At the NAB Show Sunday, The Thomson subsidiary introduced MediaFuse, a “hardware-software” platform that fully automates the process of segmenting, encoding and processing stories within minutes of their broadcast.

The system is also capable of encoding live broadcasts in near realtime and streaming them with or without the original commercial breaks.

The platform is an add-on to Grass Valley’s popular news production automation system, Ignite.

Grass Valley is demonstrating a fully functional prototype of MediaFuse at NAB this week.

According to Product Manager Scott Matics, Grass Valley expects to install a “pilot system” at a TV station in May, complete development and testing and have it ready for market in October. He wouldn't identify the station.

Grass Valley has developed an interface that fully integrates MediaFuse with the WorldNow Web platform.

WorldNow is a leading provider of Web services to TV stations in the United States.

MediaFuse is hardware heavy and not inexpensive. According to Grass Valley, prices depend on the number of user interfaces, redundancy and other variables.

A typical small-market configuration runs $172,000, it says, while a typical large-market system might go for $349,000.

According to Matics, MediaFuse has several years of development behind it.

ParkerVision began work on it as part of its news automation system, which morphed into Ignite after Grass Valley purchased ParkerVision in 2004.

“There is quite a bit under the hood,” Matics says.

MediaFuse ties in with popular newsroom computer systems like iNews and ENPS. When reporters or producers are creating their stories on one of the newsroom computers, they enter metadata with instructions on how the stories should look and function on other Web and mobile platforms, Matics says.

They categorize the stories, tag them with key words for easy search and even indicate which clips (those containing Major League Baseball highlights, for instance) must be restricted from the Web, Matics says.

The MediaFuse metadata is ingested into Ignite along with all the other instructions that will dictate the flow and look of the news.

At the same time Ignite is rolling out the newscast, MediaFuse is encoding the newscast twice—once as a high-quality “master encoded show file,” which will later be carved up into the individual clips, and once as a live video stream that can be fed directly to the Web.

Grass Valley sees MediaFuse's ability to change the commercial breaks in the live video stream as one of its chief selling points.

“It’s really pretty easy to encode and stream your show live, but being able to change out the breaks and alter that content is where MediaFuse shines,” Matics says.

The feature can be used to insert Web-only advertising or simply to shorten commercial breaks since online viewers have much less patience for long breaks, Matics says.

Immediately after a newscast, MediaFuse chops up the master encoded show file into individual clips that can be sent to the Web or to a mobile carrier for on-demand access by viewers.

The MediaFuse system has a dedicated terminal where a producer can review, edit and approve the clips before they are forwarded. The producer can check the metadata, change the thumbnail or adjust the start and end points.

“It shouldn’t add any more than a few additional minutes to the process,” Matics says.

Tom Guzik, video strategy adviser to WorldNow, says that the interface between MediaFuse and WorldNow does more than insure speedy importation of the clips by WorldNow. WorldNow producers will be able to talk back to MediaFuse stations and dip into the metadata to make additions and edits.

“This should be extremely exciting to our customers,” Guzik says. “They want to publish more content at a lower cost and they want to publish it faster,” he adds. “Right now, a lot of live streaming is unmonetized because replacing the live advertising is very difficult. This will create more live streaming and more revenue from live streaming.”

Grass Valley’s relationship with WorldNow is not exclusive, but it is important, says Matics.

“We have a lot of common customers who have been asking us to work with WorldNow because they like what it’s doing, the workflow that it gives them,” he says.