CBS19 News Speeds Up Breaking News with Blackbird

Posted: 08/01/2026

For CBS19 News in Charlottesville, Virginia, speed and access to video are critical. Serving a local audience with daily broadcasts, digital stories, and breaking news, the newsroom needs to move quickly often with a small team and limited resources.

Before adopting Blackbird, CBS19 relied on a traditional on-prem editing workflow that made collaboration slow and access to footage fragmented. File transfers, delayed feedback, and limited real-time collaboration slowed turnaround, especially during breaking news.

By moving to Blackbird’s cloud-based video editing platform, CBS19 transformed how video flows through the newsroom. The station now runs two live ingest feeds 24/7, capturing broadcast content directly into Blackbird and making it instantly accessible to around 25 users across producers, reporters, anchors, and the digital team. Reporters can identify clips directly from the field and feed back via LiveU systems directly to the newsroom so producers can begin editing in real time, and anchors and digital teams can retrieve and publish clips immediately  – all from a centralized media library, with no downloads or file transfers.

The impact has been dramatic. CBS19 now saves 15+ hours per week through faster editing and review, while reporters save around 30 minutes per news piece by eliminating the need to edit in the field and send large files back to the newsroom. The cloud workflow has also reduced hardware costs and enabled the team to do more with fewer people.

Blackbird has dramatically improved our workflows using both content from our network affiliates, and from our crews in the field. Our time to get video or sound from the field on the air is now unbelievably fast. In breaking news situations, I can’t tell you how many times Blackbird has been critical for getting sound and video on air faster and cleaner than our previous method — and it takes less people to do it.

We are a small market station, so the ability to turn more content with less people, freeing up staff to go get even more news is huge. Blackbird is a really big boost for our productivity, workflow, and the quality of news we put on the air.

— Dan Schutte, News Director, CBS19 News

With Blackbird, CBS19 spends less time managing media and more time delivering the news when it matters most.