Blog / Television

On Wednesday, August 20th there was a tragic shooting in Surrey. It appears that an Indo-Canadian man opened fire during a domestic dispute, killing his wife and critically injuring his daughter.

As part of the news coverage, Global TV talked with Manpreet Grewal of Abbotsford Community Services, and ran clips from the Village of Men public service announcements that we produced. Once again we are reminded of how important this issue is. If you are aware of any family that has domestic violence issues, there is help available. Visit www.villageofmen.com and get help today.

Here is a link to the story that ran on Global BC.

Over the past few weeks, I have been working hard at Global BC to implement a new system that better integrates the scripting computers that the producers and reporters use with the on-air graphics systems that create all the names, numbers, etc. that you see on the screen during the broadcast.

For example, let’s say a viewer emails in a picture that we want to put on TV. With the old system, the graphics operators would take the picture, crop it, put it into the Deko (the graphics computer), and save the page to a number they could play back later, or make a movie that could be dropped into a story. With the new system, the picture is saved and put into a template through the producer’s scripting computer, and the graphic appears in the playlist that will go on air. This will free up time for graphics operators to create more complex graphics (like maps) and make it easier to share graphics across the different Global stations across the country.

When we put together the plan of how this was going to work, I had a few important considerations…

• We had to make it so the graphics would work across 3 on-air machines, as well as dozens of far-flung producer workstations.
• We had to create a process that would seem familiar enough to everyone who used it.
• We had to make the new process really fast. Sometimes we’re making graphics literally seconds to air, and any delay in the file handling would greatly impact our ability to cover live breaking news.

By far the most important part to me was that of the end-user experience. The graphics operators are very busy all day creating special graphics that go into the shows. Anything that would slow down their day would create undue hardship. So I ended up putting together a lot of computer code that would make moving the created graphic to the on-air machines as simple as hitting a button. This also had to be done with the producers and reporters computers. Their job is producing the news, not dealing with technology. The system had to take that into account.

Often when we go about changing the way a system works, we don’t pay enough attention to the motivations of the person who has to use the system. The benefit of the new system for producers is that they can see what their graphic is going to look like before it goes to air, right from their computer. The benefit for the people in the graphics room is we’re now going to be faster at doing the job in a facility that will be handing the news in 4 different markets and Global National.

When doing any kind of project, you can never go wrong when you begin with the end audience in mind.

There were a few different themes to come out of the Podcast and Portable Media Expo, but the one that stuck with me the most is the concept of authenticity. Television, as a product, is groomed and worked over many times before it finally hits the air. We spend a lot of time getting every detail just right over many revisions before the show is ready to go out. At the end of the day the television show looks better, and the quality of the on-air product is increasing all the time. But through that process, television is robbed of much of the spontaneity and humanness that occurs in real life.

Audiences are aware of this, and have now turned to reality TV to try to gain some of that back. The popularity of reality TV comes from that finely-tuned illusion that what we’re seeing is really happening. Reality TV production is now a fine art of maintaining the reality illusion while still putting together a show that is dramatic. We don’t see the off-screen producers, prompting the on-air personas to act and talk a certain way, and the careful editing of a show to shape a story and create the outcome that producers want. Most of it is not malicious, producers want what they think will create the best show for the best chance of ratings success. That’s true with any show on television. But that spontaneity and genuine warmth of Life with a capital L is nowhere to be found.

So at a convention of video podcasters, there was lots of talk about one of the main selling points of what they do, which is authenticity. Because it’s often just a person in front of a camera, online video is much better at cutting through that wall. It’s much easier to identify with that person on camera in an online video, because you know there’s not an army of handlers and executives vetting every word. It is what it purports to be, and cuts much closer to what is real than any reality TV show can.

In that vein, we all in many ways create a public persona, especially when we create the public face of a business. We try to put our best foot forward, say all the right things on the websites, create the most professional outward appearance we can. The problem with that is, like television, people are expecting that and can see it for what it is. Everybody tries to create that image. It’s not to say that we at upNext Media are not professional and polished, I am very confident in the videos that we create and how we serve our clients. That being said, the actual experience of working with me and my team of producers and technicians is something that isn’t being properly conveyed in our public persona. What’s behind the example videos on the website is still a mystery.

The danger in being authentic, in trying to strip some of that persona away, is that our company would then be seen as different. You may be saying that’s a good thing, but it’s still risky, or more people would be doing it. But in being different, we would then become more real, and perhaps a little more remarkable.

Your comments and thoughts would be appreciated.

Like a lot of traditional television outlets, the siren call of online distribution is being heard in the hallways of HBO. The reason that all these companies aren’t blasting their signal over the internet right now is the danger of angering all their distribution partners. The last thing HBO wants to do is make all the cable and satellite companies that carry them all angry. The major American networks like Fox are already hearing from a lot of angry affiliate stations as the networks bypass the local station and put their content online. Here’s an article that explores this delicate business situation.

read more | digg story

Television should not be in fear of the power of the internet to replace it. This according to a Google executive over the weekend. Instead of worrying about whether or not Google is going to eat television’s lunch, the important thing is the ability to produce quality content and tell stories. To me it’s going to be a lot like radio. Video didn’t kill the radio star, but radio changed in relation to the advent of television. I haven’t heard a radio play in quite some time, but radio is still a reliable money maker for many conglomerates. Perhaps television won’t be the home of episodic dramas and comedies, but become more like radio, the home of news and other live happenings.

read more | digg story