IBC: Vizrt and never.no Partner on Social Media

Will provide a comprehensive suite of social media tools for broadcasters

By George Winslow -- Broadcasting & Cable, 9/4/2012 5:52:23 PM

Complete Coverage: IBC 2012

With social media likely to be one of the hottest topics at this year's IBC, never.no and Vizrt have announced a partnership to jointly offer broadcasters a comprehensive package of social media tools that are designed to both engage viewers and offer programmers new sources of content and user data.

As part of the suite of tools, broadcasters will be able to take user-generated content and easily integrate it into Vizrt's graphics and multiplatform distribution workflows.

Using never.no technology, the solutions will also allow broadcasters to monitor, filter, approve, and capture tweets, SMS, MMS, RSS feeds, Facebook posts and a variety of other social media content that can then be pushed to air or posted on their digital platforms.

The material can also be easily incorporated into Vizrt's data-driven 3D graphics products and integrated with a variety of newsroom computer systems, such as Avid iNews and AP's ENPS.

The solution would also allow broadcasters to instruct viewers to post their comments on the station's Facebook page, or tweet on a specific hash-tagged topic and then then ingest those responses to create tickers of Twitter comments, show online poll results, put Facebook posts in a graphic or use the content in a variety of other ways.

As part of never.no's interactive "TV. Mobile. Social. 1Framework," broadcasters can also use "word clouds" to determine and analyze what's trending on Facebook, Twitter and other social media and use that help their coverage on news events.

Comments posted by people during an storm, for example, can collected and placed onto maps in Viz World to give a perspective of where the events are taking place.

Vizrt is also providing a number of tools to automate the process of incorporating social content on the air and to push content to social networks.

Viz MultiChannel, Vizrt's channel branding tool, for example, allows broadcasters to update Facebook and Twitter pages automatically.

Other Vizrt products-including the Viz Trio character generator and Viz Content Pilot, a template-based live graphics system-can also integrate virtually any kind of social content into graphics and scenes while Viz Virtual Studio can incorporate social content into immersive 3D sets and Viz Ticker can scroll the information across the screen.