The demand for newsroom automation equipment in India has grown sharply due to proliferation of news channels. (Research conducted in September 2008)

The market for newsroom automation equipment in India is on the rise. Factors attributed to the growth include setting up of plethora of news channels especially regional news channels, transition from standard definition (SD) to high definition (HD), and increasing investments especially from overseas. Most of the major players in newsroom automation from the USA, European, and Japanese companies have their presence in India through some business partners and distributors.

Major players include Benchmark, Ideal Broadcasting, Omnibus, Real Image, Thomson Grassvalley, and Playbox.

Benchmark Microsystems is one of the leading system integration companies for news in India. All installations are not only running smoothly, but are also counted among the most successful news channels in their country/genre. Buoyed by this success, Benchmark is venturing into other regions of the world.

In recent time news channels have seen a rapid increase both in regional and local content. Breaking news has been a key factor for the success of news channels in India. This in turn has led to the setting up of newsrooms, which require broadcast equipment. Newsroom systems routinely include either integrated editing applications or tight integration with separate applications. System integrators have taken the approach of integrating widely available editing products, making fully-integrated systems even less expensive and more scalable.

Benchmark has invested heavily into hiring, training, and inspiring experienced professionals. Benchmark is perhaps the only company having a dedicated team for designing TV channels. This design starts with designing the workflow, helping the station to hire people, help them design their office, and helping the station in other areas such as cabling, air conditioning, technical furniture, interiors, and raised flooring. It ends with the team hand holding the operators, journalists, news producers, and helping the station go on air. Benchmark has also developed deep expertise into each of the technologies employed in a news environment, newsroom systems, editing systems, automation systems, graphics systems, networking, baseband systems, and control systems.

Ideal Broadcasting, the Indian arm of Ideal Systems Asia Pacific Limited, is considered as a system integrator par excellence. Since it was established in 2000, Ideal has been involved in the set-up of various news projects in India.

Omnibus in India is represented by Shaf Broadcast Private Limited. The company delivers comprehensive master control, automation, playout, and media content management solutions to broadcast, cable, satellite, and telecom operators across the globe. The company's transmission, newsroom, content management and workflow solutions address every area of television, mobile TV, and IPTV-related operations.

Real Image is one of India's foremost technology providers in the film, video, and audio markets. The company through its partner Avid provides newsroom automation solutions to television channels in India.

Thomson Grassvalley is one of the major solution providers for newsroom automation in India.

The Playbox broadcast automation system supports all existing I/O interfaces, all video-audio standards, graphics, digital video effects, and compression formats.

The major customers for this segment in India Include news channels such as News 24, Live India, Zee News, Star News, Aaj Tak, INX News, TV9 Mumbai, and SAAM News

India is perhaps one of the most competitive markets for news. TV stations that carry news have to be very focused and agile, if they need to figure anywhere in the ratings game. They need to have planned everything down to the last detail before they get into the business. Obviously, the most important issue is getting the right people. Once there are right people, there is a need to get the right technology backbone in place. The only saving grace now is that if the system is designed well (tightly integrated), a 24x7 news channel can be run with lesser number of people, in other words at a lower operational cost.

One of the most important trends over the last year in the cable and broadcast industry must certainly be that now anyone can create their own programs and broadcast to the world through Internet streaming sites such as YouTube or by creating their own steaming site. Major cable news channels the world over now rely on viewers to upload news stories that otherwise could not be accessed as quickly. We truly live in a world that is quickly losing its borders. However, as with all stories telling, facts can easily be distorted, and it is important for us as professional story tellers to protect this integrity.

One of the things most valued about my liberal arts university education in Canada was the continued focus of the professors to make us think. By that I mean to view the problem, or point from another angle. Everyone has opinions and it is important for others, not only to respect these opinions but also question whether we agree with them. As professional storytellers we need to remember to continually focus on the main story and show the issues from all angles.

These days we hear sad stories and the media telling the world is in a recession and yes, there are many people and companies having to make adjustments i n their lives—but, stories on the other side of the recession focus on the new opportunities.

While we hear of the troubles of the auto industry in North America, I just heard that sales of Honda's second-generation Insight hybrid electric car reached 10,481 units in Japan last month, making it the best-selling car in the country. The Insight is an environmentally friendly car equipped with both an electric motor and an internal combustion engine that drastically reduces fuel consumption (30km/l of gas). This is the first time that a hybrid electric vehicle has become a best-seller in Japan. It demonstrates how the global automotive industry is becoming biased toward environmentally friendly cars. Closer home, there is a mini-housing boom in my home down in Canada currently, because the lower interest rates for housing loans are making it more affordable to purchase a house and many first homebuyers are taking advantage of this opportunity. Similarly, there are some excellent options and prices for newer HD technology now for video and broadcast equipment.

So why bother to upgrade your station to HD now?

Answer is simple. You need to think about this to make your establishment more competitive in the world market. By upgrading to USD 2500 HD memory card cameras you immediately save the cost of tapes. In addition, the video files can be transferred over the Internet rather than physically moving the tapes—another immediate cost saving.

However, one of the important reasons for a station to move to production in HD is to be able to open up new sources of revenue—dding HD video to your website will bring in premium image and sales revenue from international viewers—and most importantly allow you to sell your stories internationally. With the success of the film Slumdog Millionaire sweeping the world, the world is looking for good content from Indian public broadcasters such as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Australian Broadcast, and the BBC, all offer their programming on Blu-ray disk for home viewing on LCD displays—and it is easy for cable operators to do so now with new editing software in HD. Take advantage of this opportunity, invest a little in a few HD systems, and go after the additional sales revenue on the worldwide market-good stories that are focused and fair, will sell. These are exciting times for us all indeed.

Today in the age of world-wide communication, both global and local news gathering are becoming commonplace in our day to day life. Audiences expect the news gathering and diffusion to be instant and with no compromise in the quality of audio or video. Radio audiences expect to hear live field reports from journalists, hear the sounds of the event environment, and hear for themselves the voices making the news story itself.

In previous days—and still commonplace today—a field journalist would carry an audio recorder to the site of the news story. Sound bites, or actualities, were gathered, along with ambient sounds, and sometimes the reporting voice of the journalist. Typically, these recordings were brought back to a news-editing workstation for assembly into a concise, coherent radio news story.

While this workflow is still found in field reporting, technology advances are bringing about more options allowing radio journalists to file their reports live from the field-no matter where that field is.News organizations can exploit modern links between remote locations and their studios. Journalists use technologies like Internet, ISDN, dial-up plain old telephone service or POTS microwave and satellite to link live news locations to local studios and across the world. Engineers and news directors, as well as field reporters and studio operators, should understand their connectivity options and, hence, their equipment selection options.

Reporters in the field often are presented with only one option for feeding live or recorded audio to their office/studio. They should be equipped to utilize that one option, no matter what it may be.

Dial-up POTS connections are disappearing in many locales. Indeed, many so-called POTS connections are really voice-over-I-P connections with a POTSs, or analog adapter. These non-wireline POTS connections work fine for telephone-quality voice calls, but they usually will not work with audio coding technologies intended for real, or wireline POTS connections. This is evidenced by the difficulty in sending fax transmissions over VoIP-enabled telephone systems. Moreover, the effect of not having real or wireline POTS connections implies that certain technologies developed for broadcast use, such as the POTS-to-POTS audio codec, are unlikely to work over such non-wireline connections. This is a very real problem for broadcasters who have made a large stake in POTS-to-POTS codec technology.

Further, ISDN lines are not available in many or most areas, even in some metropolitan areas of well-developed countries. Though ISDN is often a viable option for fixed connections in a studio environment, it is losing in popularity and availability overall.

No matter the connection available, it is important to exploit the benefits and reduce any liabilities of the technology being used. For example, if a POTS line is available in the field, and ISDN is available at the news studio, there exists reliable and high-quality audio codec equipment that exploits the interconnection of field POTS and studio ISDN connections. Excellent audio quality is available in this scenario using a "POTS to ISDN" codec pair, such as the Telos Xport and Telos Xstream. Advanced audio coding algorithms such as MPEG aacPlus provide excellent monaural audio which is detailed and full-frequency, even at POTS dial-up bit rates of 18 to 24 kilobits per second.

As IP connections—whether wired or wireless—become more commonly available, it becomes important to exploit these options for live news gathering.

GSM cell phone, 2G and 3G wireless, and IP connectivity—wired and wireless—are all on the rise. The higher-speed 3G connectivity options are working quite well in many locales. There are problems, both real and potential, which must be addressed in their application. But, this emerging connectivity option—wireless—beckons new equipment options and the understanding of their use. Additionally, wired IP connections to the Internet are becoming much more ubiquitous. Homes, businesses, hotels, cafes, and schools are wiring for convenient Internet access. WiFi wireless access is also becoming very popular, with many WiFi hotspot owners leaving their access points open, either for charitable reasons or because they do not know how to secure them.

IP audio codecs are becoming increasingly popular for field-to-studio and studio-to-studio audio transmission. Generally, these IP audio codecs are available in two major varieties. The first, most common variety we will refer to as standard IP audio codecs. These are IP audio codecs which are manually set by a knowledgeable engineer for the sending and receiving characteristics needed. Such codecs may be preset to produce an encoded audio stream at a given, selected, bit-rate. If an excellent IP connection is assured from end-to-end, then an engineer might choose MPEG layer 2 encoding and 256 kilobits per second as the target bit-rate. At the receiving end, if low latency is assured, then a small receive buffer of perhaps 250 milliseconds would be selected. However, if the IP connection between the end points cannot fully maintain the selected bit rate or exhibits packet jitter beyond the packet buffer time selected, then audio dropouts will occur. If dropouts occurred or were likely at a relatively high bit-rate, the engineer may choose an alternate codec, such as MPEG Layer 3, or AAC, and use a lower bit-rate for audio coding and transmission. The engineer would choose an encoding bit-rate and a packet buffer size that would surely not violate the instant bandwidth and packet jitter of the IP connection during the broadcast. Hence, it is necessary with standard IP audio codecs to under-utilize the IP link's bandwidth in order to assure a stable, dropout-free audio transmission. Also, as adjustment for varying packet latency is not automatic with standard IP audio codecs, the engineer must provision the buffer at each receive end to accommodate the worst-case packet jitter expected over the given IP connection. This figure may be as low as 100 milliseconds, but it could easily exceed 1000 milliseconds or more, depending on the jitter characteristics of the entire IP connection.

This standard IP audio codec variety, then, requires that a knowledgeable engineer choose the best codec for the IP connection, choose and set a bit rate that will never exceed the instantaneous bandwidth available on the link, and set a packet buffer on the receiver that assures any packet resends or lost packets will be made up before the buffer is emptied. Otherwise, audio dropouts will occur.

Standard IP audio codecs, then, are best suited for use where the IP connection's characteristics are well-known, guaranteed, and/or controllable. Such is often the case with point-to-point or private wide area connections, or WANs. However, this is not likely to be the case with shared public Internet connections, which are becoming commonplace and so convenient. Unfortunately, it is the most commonly available IP connections which are worst-suited for the capabilities of a standard IP codec. A trouble-free audio connection is not assured when bandwidth and latency are variable. Itinerant connections to the Internet are further hampered when dealing with the myriad Internet firewalls and NAT routers in use. With a standard IP codec, it is often absolutely necessary to gain administrative access to the router/firewall in order to set port-forwarding or DMZ port characteristics. Such expertise is beyond the capabilities of most field journalists, even if administrative access to the router/firewall could be obtained. All told, then, it seems that standard IP codecs are not well suited for field use. They are best employed on quality-assured, configurable IP networks.

The second variety of IP audio codecs we will call intelligent IP audio codecs. This would encompass a class of IP audio codecs that have the ability to automatically adjust to a given static or changing IP connection. The second technology is called agile connection technology or ACT. ACT-enables the equipment to monitor both the available bandwidth and the packet jitter across the IP connection, and make adjustments to both the codec and to the receive packet buffer. These two adjustments are inaudible - or nearly so - when being made. They allow the codec pair to continue to pass good-quality to high-quality audio at the lowest possible latency at all time across any usable IP connection.

Additionally, it is important that, no matter what audio coding algorithm is sent in either direction, the receiving end be able to determine the algorithm quickly and accurately, and decode the stream appropriately. Such algorithm identification was not designed into the specs of most coding algorithms. Therefore, in older equipment, the receiving equipment must be properly configured to receive the expected coding format. Intelligent IP audio codecs can quickly and accurately communicate between themselves the coding format being sent, so the receiving unit will automatically decode it properly. Other features designed into an intelligent IP audio codec should include automatic negotiation of NAT router ports, and easy buddy-list IP-address dialing. Such lists or groups may be password protected. The system works much as a buddy list in typical instant messaging software in which a rendezvous server keeps track of a user's authorized friends for easy connections.

As non-technical personnel are often employed in journalist and news editing and presenter roles, it is important that the equipment they use be designed for easy and automatic operation. IP-audio equipment, Such automatic features as described are found in intelligent IP audio codecs. They enable non-technical personnel to set up and initiate high-quality, two-way audio connections, including on-the-scene news reporting, from any location with a usable IP connection.