Reuters brought together more than 60 news media industry experts at its offices in London in early March for a full-day hackathon event, with the goal of revolutionising the distribution of live video.
The hackathon aimed to help alleviate an industry-wide pain point by making live video coverage data and content streams available for machine-to-machine communication. This could remove many of the cumbersome manual steps in today’s live video distribution processes.
Hosted by Reuters, the hackathon is part of the Live Production Exchange (LPX), an initiative from the Digital Production Partnership (DPP), an association for media production companies.
Reuters live video will soon be added to the Reuters application programming interface (API) for Reuters News Agency customers, a major enhancement that participants at the hackathon worked with to innovate new use cases. The new service will make it easier for Reuters customers to ingest Reuters live video streams and drive increased efficiency in the distribution and consumption of live events.
At the hackathon, participants from BBC, WarnerBros. Discovery, PA and other organizations built prototypes using LPX and the Reuters API to demonstrate the potential business benefits enabled by this innovation. This included directly integrating live coverage information with its associated video content into newsroom systems to increase the speed of getting a live event to air for audiences.
“It was great to see potential uses of our API for live video at the hackathon. It is very exciting to see how this will transform workflows and make it even quicker and easier to use Reuters Live. Participants also generated some new ideas on how to make the API better for our customers,” Tania Vivero, product manager of Reuters API said.
By contributing to a DPP recommendation on how to contribute and distribute live video across systems and organisations using an API before this becomes commonplace, Reuters is hopeful of a huge efficiency gain for the industry as a whole.
“We know from our customers that live video is only growing in importance across sport and news,” said Ian McLaren, Imagen’s Chief Technology and Product Officer at Reuters. “This won’t just transform how customers receive and integrate Reuters live video. It could really change how live event coverage is planned for technically. This could reduce the computing resources needed daily which would help us all as we look to make video production as efficient as possible.”
Media Contact:
Heather Carpenter
Heather.Carpenter @ tr.com