At NAB, media and entertainment industry software company VSN would have showcased a number of enhancements to its VSNCrea Traffic and Scheduling System, VSNExplorer Media Asset Management System and VSN NewsConnect web plugin for news production.

“Our commitment to our customers has always been to provide them with valuable additional functionalities that will have a substantial positive impact on their operations,” said Patricia Corral, Marketing Director, VSN. “At NAB, we will be taking the opportunity to demonstrate that commitment in action with new features and capabilities that can improve our customers’ efficiency, productivity and profitability – and all without any constraint when integrating third-party software or hardware.”

Enhanced Cataloguing and Media Archive Workflows with VSNExplorer MAM

The new functionality now included in VSNExplorer MAM enables users to derive even more value from their content/media assets. It uses the power of semantic searching – in which the search engine understands the meaning of the enquiry, rather than looking for literal matches – to significantly improve how metadata is associated with content and improve the ‘findability’ of content so that searching becomes much more productive.

“For any organisation looking to migrate its existing archive systems, or to bring its elderly archive system into line with what’s possible with new technologies, this new functionality will be extremely appealing,” said Corral. “It can exponentially increase the speed with which content can be catalogued, located and retrieved.”

VSNExplorer MAM is now capable of syntactically cataloguing all the terms and sentences used in the description of scenes in order to achieve formal, unambiguous, accurate and user-agnostic metadata for content in any language. Qualifiers – such as colours, mood, commercial names, types of objects and so on – can be added to metadata in order to achieve even more precise search results. Advanced thesaurus management enables users to create different groups of terms and hierarchies by defining broader, narrower, related or preferred terms.

VSN NewsConnect News Production System with Adaptive Production for all Studios

VSN NewsConnect, which brings together all the third party tools required for news production, now enables users to control multiple studios in different locations, even if the systems used in the studios are different. This provides users with maximum flexibility for their daily work, enabling them to perform all the tasks for news production within one single workspace – improving efficiency and saving time.

“What this means is that a user – typically, a journalist – can simply send a news item to any studio and NewsConnect will automatically ensure that the delivered content matches the format requirements of the receiving devices,” said Corral. “This remote interoperability is very useful in enabling news to be repurposed to the requirements of local broadcasters without worrying about technical compatibility – maximizing the value of the news.”

Previously, sending a story to a specific studio would require knowledge of the systems in use at that studio, and manual adaptation of the media to ensure compatibility with the target NRCS, NLE, CG, video server, studio playout system and so on. Now, users can focus on creating stories: NewsConnect takes care of automatically adapting the media to the different systems available, sending e.g. linear TV, WebTV, non-linear platforms or social media as appropriate.