News12 Networks are a group of seven local cable news channels in the New York metropolitan area, owned by cable television provider Altice USA. All channels provide rolling news coverage, 24 hours a day, focusing primarily on regions of the metro area outside Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island. Each channel deals with a different neighbourhood – Long Island, The Bronx, Brooklyn and others, plus New Jersey.
News12 recently expanded its Master Control graphics operations with seven new Unreal Engine graphic outputs, controlled by Polygon Ipsum data aggregation and visualisation. News12 wanted to expand its ticker operations across multiple channels, increasing its sponsorship capabilities, and take advantage of up-to-date, real-time 3D graphics creation and rendering systems.
For control of the outputs, Polygon Ipsum, a cloud-based application, is used to centralise its master control graphics system for the seven stations, and for data curation and to centralise scheduling. All data, content and sponsorship management and control is done through a web browser connected to the Polygon Web Server.
Data comes from Polygon’s integrations with online news, weather, sports, public alert and social media sources – AP, Reuters, Opta, Stats, CNN, Weather Bell, Custom Weather, WSI and others. The engines, data and teams do not have to be located at any one place in order to control playout.
Ipsum can work with XML, JSON and RSS feeds. At News12, it works as a datafeed hub for news templates and weather, and supports both automated and manual playout modes with real-time graphics preview in a browser. For their scheduled sponsorships, the network can produce as-run log reports. It also integrates with MCR automation and traffic systems to give control of live video sources, clips and video input layouts.
In particular the network chose Polygon Ipsum and Unreal Engine to run multiple on-air tickers, weather graphics, channel branding and events-based graphics. Ipsum aggregates all News12’s incoming data feeds to suit the purposes of the channels, and controls a series of Unreal Engine outputs. It works as a simple, scalable interface for its producers and journalists to manage, curate, share and playout these feeds efficiently from any browser, at any location.
Ipsum’s integration with the Unreal Engine delivers HD-SDI or IP streams from Unreal via Pixel Streaming. When a packaged Unreal Engine application is run on a desktop PC, or a server in the cloud, users connect using a web browser on their chosen desktop or mobile platform, and stream the rendered frames and audio from the application.
“It’s important for us to establish look and feel that can be informative and dynamic, because we want to engage our viewers as far as possible and distinguish ourselves from the competition,” said Travis Machacek, Director of Technical Operations, News12. “Polygon Ipsum gives our graphics that unique look plus it is cost-effective, scalable and gives us unlimited graphics control and coordination.” www.polygonlabs.us
