Australian finance channel chooses cloud-native for its new operation
The Australian online channel ausbiz was successfully launched in early 2020 as a continuous live service dedicated to business and financial news.
When building the new channel, ausbiz looked for solutions that would not tie them to heavy infrastructure and installations. From the technical brief process, CEO Kylie Merritt said:
“When presented with the opportunity to build a newsroom from scratch, we wanted to find intuitive, scalable platforms which would allow our journalists to focus on content, not systems.”
The brief from ausbiz was both creative and bold compared to what we have seen in the industry so far, with news channels often being built with traditional infrastructure and teams and roles fitting a standard news and production environment. From the ausbiz list of requirements for the project, they had, amongst others:
- Building up a news channel with as little on-premise architecture as possible
- A preference for cloud-based SaaS solutions to support cash flow and allow the architecture to be as flexible and scalable as possible.
- Contribution, storage, story creation, clipping and distribution in the cloud with as much automation of tasks as possible
- Editorial staff only; no engineering staff
One can only imagine the reaction from point 4 on this list with "Editorial staff only; no engineering staff" for any news organisation or traditional broadcasters. This probably raised some interesting discussions across their teams. How to do this? What tools to choose? What about security, updates and maintenance?
Integrated workflows and cloud-native are key
At the centre of the news and video production workflows at ausbiz sits the story-centric newsroom system Dina by 7Mountains and video collaboration and cloud PAM/MAM tool Mimir by Mjoll.
The tools of choice are cloud-native applications with all the benefits of a true Software-as-a-Service tool, with browser-based user interfaces tailored for work-from-anywhere. Software updates are continuously deployed without any downtime. Complex and expensive upgrade projects are a thing of the past.
Dina is the core storytelling and newsroom system at ausbiz. It is accessed via a web browser and is used by the ausbiz team to plan, create and publish linear news stories. Dina has a rundown module that integrates with the graphics, media management, video editing, and studio automation systems in the ausbiz workflow.
In the ausbiz workflow, Dina integrates with the following:
- Mimir for finding and adding videos and images to stories built for online, social media channels or in a rundown.
- Viz Pilot Edge for adding graphics to stories in their rundowns.
- Viz Mosart for playout automation.
- Teleprompter
With a smart and integrated workflow, the setup for their studio and control room becomes far more efficient than in a traditional news control room, where one operator has access to all. And with tools that are cloud-native, they are rigged to access their systems for creating the news, planning, collaborating, building rundowns, accessing their media archive and more from anywhere they want. It all runs in web browsers and requires an Internet connection only.
From the control room at ausbiz:
AI and automated workflows
Mimir is the core video production and video management system at ausbiz. It is used for ingesting videos and images to cloud storage, finding media files from an archive, advanced search, and as a subtitling tool, amongst other things.
The ausbiz team automates their metadata logging using the integrated AI services in Mimir, such as speech-to-text transcription, multi-language translation, object detection, and more.
Mimir is hosted inside Adobe Premiere Pro for the ausbiz craft editors and becomes the source monitor. This gives craft editors full access to all Mimir features for managing their videos, advanced search, proxy workflows and more. Mimir also integrates with CuttingRoom, used by journalists for editing highlights.
Learn more about the technical setup at ausbiz on the 7Mountains website article here.
7Mountains' reseller and partner, Stem Media, presented the ausbiz case in a webinar that can be accessed on the 7Mountains website here.
