Independent Television News here in London will use the digital newsroom system jointly developed by Oracle Corp and Sony Corp to produce its satellite World News Programme. Sony and Oracle announced the newsroom automation system in April (CI No 2,614) in a bid to take on Avid Technology Inc in the broadcast market. The system is claimed to enable journalists to research, script and edit news, sift through compressed video clips and then transmit broadcast quality material direct from 12 networked personal computers. Oracle’s Media Server will be used to store 10-to-one-compressed digital images, two additional Oracle databases will store high quality non-compressed digital video, scripts and one month’s worth of archived news footage. Previewing compressed video clips before selecting broadcast quality pictures avoids the need to install an fully asynchronous network, ITN said. More complex editing such as video mixing and audio processing will be carried out on five Unix workstations. Finished stories will be stored the on-air buffer, a RAID-based workstation. The system will be Unix-based but Oracle has not yet decided whose Unix boxes it will use. ITN said that the system would blur the distinctions between roles within the newsrooms by enabling journalists to carrying out a wider of tasks which some interpreted as a thinly veiled threat of redundancies. A full roll-out of the system within ITN is expected in 1997 although the company said that the newsroom system currently being tested might not necessarily be the one it eventually implements. The agreement represents a snub to Basys Ltd, the company formed by ITN to market the original newsroom system it developed; Basys is now owned by Avid, and no-one would say why Basys was shunned in this instance. And neither party would say how much the project, which starts next spring, will cost.
