Zixi Enables Easier, Smarter News Sharing and Collaboration

Two years after the pandemic prompted widespread acceptance of remote production workflows by broadcasters, sharing content has never been easier.

Whether it’s for a work in progress or finished media, broadcasters are calling on a combination of cloud, software and transport technologies to facilitate collaborating and sharing at a station or across groups. And as much as the technology has improved, some challenges remain.

There are a number of reasons broadcasters want the ability to enable teams to work remotely yet collaboratively. Even before COVID-19 sent nearly everyone into work-from-home frameworks, broadcasters were looking for ways to streamline workflows through remote operations.

A ‘Virtual Production Booth’

Broadcasters had been relying on tools like Zoom and Teams to obtain video of people due to the pandemic’s social distancing needs.

LiveU’s Air Control connects people by video from remote events, Arco Groenenberg, LiveU’s director of sales for the central region, says, allowing broadcasters to remotely bring in guests and take advantage of a remote green room.

“It almost creates a virtual production booth,” he says.

LiveU’s Matrix is like a router in the cloud that makes sharing content easier, Groenenberg says. “Sinclair, CBS, Fox-owned-and-operated, NBC — they’re all on this platform to share content between their television stations,” he says. “If they have a breaking story in Cincinnati and they want to share it, they can throw it into this platform and other people can see it.”

Using the LiveU Matrix Dynamic Share service, producers can define their live feed’s destination ad-hoc, via the Global Directory.

Matrix is also used for pool content, such as the Denver helicopter feed during the Derek Chauvin trial, he says.

Behind much of the content moving around the industry is the cloud-native Zixi software platform, which supports 17 protocols. Zixi has 350 technology partners, including Panasonic, and has been in the original equipment manufacturing level for over a decade.

“The sharing of news and stories has been hyperbolic,” Zixi’s Bolton says.

And he expects 5G to impact sharing as it will make it possible to “grab signals” where it may not have been feasible in the past.

Improved Connectivity

Connectivity where signals are iffy is critical for journalists out in the field. Dejero’s connectivity technology has improved since COVID started, Rob Waters, director of global sales for Dejero, says.

The company’s latest EnGo 265 GateWay uses smart blending technology “to create one huge internet connection,” he says.

The GateWay makes it possible to “research on the move, transfer large files, and access MAM systems from remote locations,” Waters says. “It allows them to tell better stories. They’re not constrained by whatever connection they’ve got available.”

One EnGo customer in Australia uses it as a mobile transmitter for a weekly live three-way conversation between two remotely located experts and an anchor at Channel 7 for a program called Sunrise, he says.

As Eric Bolton, Zixi’s VP of business development, puts it, “pre-pandemic, these things were very much all underway. Because of the pandemic what we saw was ‘in case of emergency please break glass’” and all the collaboration tools available “got put onto high gear when people couldn’t go onto premises.”

One of those early steps was technology that allowed journalists to quickly work on stories in the field so they could avoid the drive back to the station.