CNN went live from its multi-million-dollar broadcast facility in Abu Dhabi last month, marking a new chapter in the network’s history in the Middle East. In an interview with BroadcastPro ME, the Abu Dhabi team shares details of the new technologies that have helped launch the news operation into the future.
On February 27, CNN launched its first full show using its brand-new studio facility in the Abu Dhabi Yas Creative Hub. The 600sqm bureau, home to 40 staff, has enabled the team to increase the scale and scope of its operation in the UAE. As one of the network’s key international production hubs alongside Atlanta, New York, London and Hong Kong, it marks the latest of several major investments in technology and editorial production for CNN.
“This brand-new bureau is a multimillion-dollar investment by CNN, which underscores how important this region is to the network,” Becky Anderson, Managing Editor of CNN Abu Dhabi & Anchor, tells BroadcastPro ME. “Its primary purpose is to tell stories about the region, from the region, but also to offer a regional perspective on global stories for audiences around the world. From a production standpoint, what the new bureau brings is a far more technically versatile, efficient facility, geared towards collaborative workflows. Put simply, that means we can produce more dynamic programming on a set that gives us many more presentation options, and we are better integrated into CNN’s global systems. Beyond these walls, twofour54’s Yas Creative Hub is an inspiring environment for the creative industries here, a growing community of which we’re excited to be a part.”
From a technical standpoint, the new bureau has been designed to enable multiplatform content creation with hybrid digital and IP video/audio workflows. CNN’s hybrid AV stack combines the reliability and broad industry support of SDI and Dante with the flexibility of NDI, offering some new capabilities to the bureau.
“As the industry moves to IP, hybrid workflows became even more relevant. We are able to combine core technologies into brand-new flexible systems. NDI then gives us the scalability and flexibility to enable cutting-edge creative production needs into the future. This, together with intelligent control surfaces, bring the technical and production teams into the forefront of high-tech operations,” explains Leo Tucker-Brown, Engineering Manager at CNN Abu Dhabi.
Daniel Symmonds, Senior Engineer and Project Manager, seconds this. “For a modest installation, 2110 is a costly and complicated undertaking and SDI alone potentially fails to take advantage of software-centric workflows. This hybrid approach has allowed us to create a technical palette which offers broad capabilities and multiple paths to enable the technical empowerment of our teams.”
The 80sqm studio will now be home to CNN International’s flagship current affairs programme, Connect the World with Becky Anderson. The facility incorporates three fully robotic camera systems from Videndum (formerly Vinten), a 10-million-pixel Unilumin video walls, four dedicated craft edit suites, and a modern, open-plan newsroom with sit and stand desks and dedicated monitoring tools in every position.
In the studio, three large video walls and three reconfigurable portrait monitors create a canvas that enables the look and feel of the space to be adapted very swiftly. These are combined with VizRT graphics engines and the deep M/E capabilities of the Newtek Tricaster Elite 2 switcher, which both have native NDI support and give the team a vast array of creative options. The Tricaster also has built-in tools for bringing in guests via popular video conferencing applications as well as for streaming out to social platforms. There is also a large green screen wall for ideas development.
The team is particularly proud of the flexibility of the newsroom: a production position can be tailored to suit a producer, technical operator or engineer at the press of a button. The bright open-plan newsroom layout offers ultrawide and dual-up displays in every seat for a tailored user experience. CNN also has a technical area which allows the team to bring capabilities such as live contributions or prompter operations, normally only found in a control room or a studio, into the newsroom. The facility also has five new downlink antennas, including one for regional feeds and SNG support.
The team has carefully planned out all areas of the facility with several technology additions and incremental upgrades. For instance, the inclusion of modern encoding techniques such as the Haivision Makito X4 means there are four bi-directional contribution lines, in place of the single paths found in the previous bureau.
“IP-capable prompting now makes switching between our local and remote operation seamless,” says Symmonds. “We now have fully rather than partially robotic camera pedestals. There are eight switcher M/Es where previously we had three. We also have shared online edit storage and cloud archive capabilities as well as a near complete elimination of analogue audio across workflows including comms. VM and KVM access to production tools eliminates duplication and centralises compute.”
The team also now has access to dynamic operator interfaces, along with a good mix of established and new video/audio processes. This has been achieved through Densitron touch controls for fully customised operator GUIs. By centralising the control of multiple vendors in one system, they have moved beyond panels which only operate one piece of equipment or one vendor’s solutions, to focus on workflows.
A big addition to the facility is media asset management capability with centralised fast storage. For this, the bureau has adopted SIMedia as its MAM, playout and record solution and centralised its online storage on OpenDrives. This system supports NDI natively, and by centralising its core media repository has eliminated the need to transfer files between systems to make them available to that process.
“The flexibility we now have operationally supports a dual workflow,” says Jude Oommen, Senior Technical Director at CNN Abu Dhabi. “On the one hand, we can join our mothership in Atlanta for our two-hour daily newscast on CNN International; on the other, we can stream bespoke content without having to go across the Atlantic to support our local initiatives like CNN Academy, moderate virtual panels and create live, packaged content for our partners.”
The newsroom, however, has its fair share of challenges.
“By far the biggest challenge for the modern newsroom is the sheer amount of information available now through social media. It’s tremendously useful to be able to pull in sources from social platforms in a breaking news situation, but verifying it is essential, and that is a time-consuming and labourintensive process – especially when false or misleading information is being deliberately circulated. We’ve invested a lot in beefing up our capabilities on this across the network over the past decade. Tech has an important role to play in this, with data analysis, geo-location and other verification tools all now a mainstream part of the newsroom and playing a role in our investigations as well as breaking news. We’re not there yet, but I anticipate AI having an important role to play in this area in the future,” says Anderson.
