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.

The post CBS19 News Speeds Up Breaking News with Blackbird appeared first on Blackbird.

The dramatic shift to digital news consumption has led news networks to seek solutions that will enable them to deliver engaging content fast to consumers across the full digital spectrum.

A leader in equipping media organizations with the latest news services to flourish in the digital age is TownNews. Used by news organisations and TV stations across the US, the TownNews platform empowers news networks to create, distribute and monetize their multimedia content.

TownNews chose to integrate Blackbird into their platform to enable news networks to easily access, edit and manage their broadcast video. All clipping and editing in Blackbird is from a web browser giving digital news teams immediate access to live broadcast content for frame accurate clipping. Frame accuracy gives teams full control over clean content with no stray frames which is vital for network mandates.

“TownNews provides us with a flexible and extendable platform that allows us to iterate and develop for our consumers’ needs nimbly and effectively.” 

Matt Strait
VP Digital Media
Meredith Corporation

Once clipped, edited and closed captions added as needed, engaging news videos can be quickly and easily sent to multiple destinations including web, OTT, apps, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

Blackbird is now used within the TownNews platform by 46 US TV Stations across 24 states for the fast turnaround of high quality and compliant news highlights. Blackbird has proven to be an agile, fast and cost-effective solution for delivering broadcast quality news content to millions of digitally savvy consumers.

The post Blackbird and TownNews power digital news production appeared first on Blackbird.

With a global audience of millions, the appetite to catch all the highlights from 4 days of play by the sport’s best golfers is extremely high – particularly over social media.

The moment that sealed it for Shane Lowry, a dream turned into reality for the Irishman ?? #TheOpen pic.twitter.com/QbsgNbGtW6

— The Open (@TheOpen) July 21, 2019

At the 148th Open Championship at Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland, leading sports rights agency, IMG, was on location with the R&A to deliver all the best action to fans as fast as possible – using Blackbird as their cloud video editing platform of choice.

With live streams feeding into Blackbird, IMG’s digital team on location at the course was able to rapidly clip, edit and publish highlights to Twitter in a matter of seconds. Conditions and bandwidth were unpredictable at times but with Blackbird able to run on just 2Mb per second, the team met the insatiable hunger for content from golf fans all over the world. They were supported by IMG’s digital team in London also using Blackbird to edit and publish highlights in real time and generate high quality content assets for archive and future use.

To drive engagement and reach, the IMG team was able to add emojis, tag players and sponsors, as well as apply geo and playback restrictions to support international rights control.

Hundreds of magical moments were delivered within seconds to golf fans over Twitter – including Emiliano Grillo’s hole-in-one and winner Shane Lowry’s victory walk up the 18th hole. As well as the top golfing action, the best behind-the-scenes content including player interviews, press conferences and practice sessions also proved to be very popular with fans on Twitter.

Using Blackbird, the tournament’s highlights were viewed millions of times on Twitter – delivering very high exposure, engagement and monetization opportunities for what was one of the greatest Open Championships in living memory.

The post The R&A and IMG use Blackbird to deliver rapid and engaging content at The 148th Open appeared first on Blackbird.

Each season of Gold Rush consists of 22 episodes produced from over 2000 hours of footage using a large setup of cameras.  For Season 1, rough-cut footage was transferred to XDCAM Pro disc on location with the discs transported to the nearest town and then sent to leading post-production house, ENVY, in London by airmail.

The ENVY team had to wait approximately 2 weeks to receive each set of rushes. This significant delay between shooting and viewing the footage created communication challenges between the Yukon and London based teams and difficulties in structuring stories. Managing and updating video files on portable hard drives for the editors’ Avid systems was time-consuming and with infrastructure expensive, the hardware-dependent workflow just wasn’t scalable.

Before work on Season 2 began, Raw TV and ENVY researched the market for a cloud-based video editing platform that could make their international workflow much more efficient. After a thorough analysis of available systems, they chose Blackbird.

Using the Blackbird cloud platform, rushes can now be delivered from Yukon to London overnight. The on-location film crew uploads XDCAM proxies generated by the cameras to ENVY’s server by FTP each evening. The following day the ENVY studios ingest the proxies into Blackbird’s codec enabling the Raw TV post team to view the rushes in Blackbird.

“This end-to-end solution gives us a much more efficient pipeline and a production that has really benefitted as a result.”

Jai Cave
Technical Operations Director
Envy Post Production

Using Blackbird in a browser, even on very low bandwidth, all project media can be accessed remotely from any location. Blackbird’s logging capabilities enables the production team to simultaneously sort through footage using keyboard shortcuts and expansions, transcription, spellcheck and metadata search.

Having instant access to the rushes enables Gold Rush’s producers to start putting story ideas together before the editing process begins. The edit team can easily inform the shoot team of editorial decisions and request story pickups due to Blackbird enabling real-time communication.

This new proxy workflow was the first of its kind in the world. The introduction of Blackbird reduced the viewing of rushes from 2 weeks to just 2 hours whilst the transfer time of files was reduced from 2 minutes to 10 seconds.

ENVY is a member of the Blackbird Productions Partnership Program. This program collaborates with post-production facilitates to provide Blackbird to TV programme creators globally.

The post Blackbird drives massive workflow efficiencies for production of Gold Rush appeared first on Blackbird.