All the news that's fit to beam

News broadcasters need to trust their connections with satellites more than ever to deliver up-to-the-second news, complete with video, quotes from witnesses and interviews with victims.

Back in the early days of news gathering, reporters stampeded to telephones to phone in their stories, while cameramen shot footage, then rushed back to studios to edit their film.

Satellite news gathering – SNG – changed all that

Today, vans deploy almost anywhere in the world to cover the breaking news event. Vehicles are equipped with advanced, two-way audio and video transmitters, and antennas that point at telecommunication satellites.

Reporters and cameramen can edit and transmit their footage immediately and report live as their signals are beamed between the van and a satellite, and between the satellite and a control room run by a broadcast station or network.

For all of this to work, a solid link has to be established between the van’s antenna and the satellite. And not only that, uplink sessions need to be scheduled to beam the transmissions so as not to conflict with others.

Thanks to the ingenuity of Europe’s satcom industry with support from ESA’S ARTES programme, this process can now be handled with a touch of a button and a click of the mouse.

Media Fleet Manager (MFM), developed by Germanys’s ND Satcom, is a software package that hides terms like ‘transponder management’ and ‘leasing transponder capacity’ behind a computer program that automatically schedules the time needed to access an available satellite using a simple drag and drop interface.

It also integrates DVB signals – the standard used to uplink with the satellite – and Internet Protocol (IP) sessions into one system.
IP is also used regularly in a broadcaster’s day to check emails and stay in contact with the newsroom.

As the news team reaches its destination and the van is parked with a clear view of the sky, the cameraman or reporter presses a button to deploy the satellite antenna. Within minutes, the antenna points itself to an available satellite, while the team prepares for its broadcast.

“An operator makes a booking within the Media Fleet Manager software which shows him or her everything that’s needed to book a spot without conflict,” explains Rainer Apfelbacher of ND Satcom.

“When the time comes according to the schedule, the transmission begins.”

From there, broadcasters air it live on television, or stream it to their websites where social media-savvy users twitter it, Facebook it or repost it on blogs.

MFM makes it possible to connect the world in less than ten clicks and to transfer bookings automatically via workflow from the MFM to participating SNG stations.With better-organised transmissions, reduced set-up times and a simple user interface, bandwidth costs are substantially reduced.

A central database stores all events and bookings and the resource management screen displays the status of available transponders and stations. Only the resources which are available at that point in time can be scheduled so booking is fast, easy and secure.

ND SatCom offers a full SNG solution, including customised vans, antennas, antenna pointing systems, HPA and the IP based SkyWAN VSAT modems that have also been developed in partnership with the ARTES 3-4 programme.

Broadcasters worldwide, be it a small three vehicle station or a broadcast service provider with more than twenty vehicles and several client networks, use the ND SatCom solution in their automated SNG fleets.

For more information, see the links in the column to the right.

Published 19 June 2013
Last updated at 03 September 2014 - 08:23