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June 03, 2009


AP's SNAPfeed Video Transmission Software: Score One Tech Point for Journalists



The technological evolution of the news media industry – though it’s been fueled largely by a loss of advertising revenue to the Internet – has yielded some of the most innovative thinking that IT has seen in the past decade.

We’ve seen the development of wireless newspaper subscriptions for e-book tablets such as the Amazon Kindle DX, real-time news feeds to cell phones and smartphones through the mobile Web and bold plans from media moguls about reversing the Internet’s curse, charging for online content.
 
It was just a few short years ago that newspapers began experimenting with so-called “multi-media” – and, at first, that amounted to photograph slideshows with music or even voice-overs from reporters in the field, sort of like online “travelogues.”
 
Today, we’re hearing about another new technology from one of the nation’s most venerable news services – an organization that got its start when four Manhattan daily newspapers agreed in 1846 to pay for dispatches from the Mexican War.
 
The Associated Press today earned a patent for software for use by reporters shooting video out in the field – think of journalists in remote areas using portable camcorders such as Flip-brand devices. The AP’s so-called “SNAPfeed” application – based on available bandwidth and deadlines – determines the amount of video compression needed for the videos that those reporters shoot, and feeds it back to their newsrooms for production, whether that’s a TV report or an upload to a Web site or something else.
 


According to Lee Perryman, AP’s director of broadcast technology, the ability for the software to help reporters meet deadlines – and the fact that it’s so easy to use that even reporters (yes, we’re known to be a tech-challenged lot) can use it – are parts of what makes SNAPfeed unique.

Perryman compares it to what you’d call “video fax.” Today, the AP earned a patent for a technology that serves an a major part of SNAPfeed – the “automatic selection of encoding parameters for transmission of media objects.”
 
The real problem that journalists have now when they want to move video without a satellite or high-speed Internet connection nearby, Perryman told TMCnet in an interview moments ago, is the issue that – regardless of what connection speed they find, whether that’s an EVDO connection, WiFi (News - Alert) or something else – their stories must be back in the newsroom at a certain time.
 
“It’s like a video fax but smart enough where a journalist in the field doesn’t have to worry about a lot of decisions,” Perryman said. “If a journalist answers the question of when does the video have to be back in newsroom, the application determines, based on avail bandwidth and the deadline, the amount of compression to apply to get video back in time.”
 
The software also works whether a journalist has a continuous Internet connection or not, he said, and works on its own – with no baby-sitting – so that a reporter, for example, could capture a video, load the SNAPfeed program, and transmit that video while he or she is driving from point A to point B (News - Alert) or returns to reporting his or her story.
 
SNAPfeed comes with the option of using the AP’s popular “Essential News Production System,” or “ENPS” tool. Right now, more than 52,000 reporters, writers, editors and producers in nearly 700 television, radio and network newsrooms in 58 nations use ENPS, which – among other things – alerts workers back in the newsroom or production studio knows that a video is coming back in, and automatically creates a placeholder for that material.
 
At the moment, Perryman said, about 200 or so news agencies are using SNAPfeed on a regular basis, and it’s being used, typically, for short, 60- or 90-second videos on breaking news.
 
The technology was developed during by the AP at the beginning of the second Gulf War, and it transmits video files about 25 percent faster than traditional FTP sites, Perryman said.
 
“Video is king, but reporters don’t have the extra time to be able to think about transmitting videos, so the beauty of this tool is that it’s available for traditional on-air broadcasting,” he said.
 

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Michael Dinan is a contributing editor for TMCnet, covering news in the IP communications, call center and customer relationship management industries. To read more of Michael's articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Michael Dinan


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