August 1, 2003
New ENPS installations in Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, the Philippines and the United Arab Emirates
Six international broadcasters have joined hundreds more worldwide in harnessing the innovation, flexibility and reliability of ENPS to power their newsrooms. These latest additions to the global ENPS family represent a large cross-section of demanding production environments and are taking full advantage of advanced capabilities including multilingual operation and seamless integration with broadcast hardware from third-party vendors.
TV3 in New Zealand adopted ENPS in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin, broadcasting evening news and current affairs programming. Because journalists spend so much time in the field, TV3 relies heavily on ENPS for connection of journalists to base resources from anywhere in New Zealand's rugged landscape. According to Director of Operations and Engineering John Allen, ENPS also allows TV3 to securely link its stations at a distance, allowing journalists to share information across the enterprise. Allen says “ENPS is working very well and has the potential to improve workflow significantly in all our studio based operations in the years to come."
Information sharing is also crucial for Global TV in Winnipeg, Canada. The CanWest-owned station is the latest of seven the company now has using ENPS across Canada, from Halifax to Vancouver. Global TV also chose ENPS because its production staff liked how ENPS fits so much information on the screen at once - including information from their Pinnacle Thunder video system, which works with ENPS via the MOS protocol.
Multivan's Channel, the only locally owned and operated television station in Vancouver, Canada, is also the area’s first multilingual broadcaster using ENPS in Cantonese, Mandarin, Punjabi, Korean and Tagalog. Channel M is making the most of ENPS integration by linking it to four other newsroom systems: Pinnacle's Deko and Thunder (character generator and still store), Grass Valley's NewsQ Pro (video), and BDL Autoscript's +WinPlus+ (prompting).
With an ambitious news schedule of 48 hours per week in Monterrey, Mexico’s third largest city, Multimedios TV is the market leader in its region. Multimedios has paired ENPS with a Leitch Rundown Manager, allowing its journalists to use ENPS to control the digital output of video during newscasts.
Eagle Broadcasting Corporation in the Philippines chose ENPS because of its MOS compliance, speed, user-friendly interface and simple integration with their existing broadcast hardware. "With ENPS, prompter scripts and CG text automation makes our job much easier and faster," according to Network General Manager Art V. de Guzman. "We can also add, drop or shuffle stories anytime within the program. It's easy-to-use, yet a powerful integrated technology for news production. It makes the news staff members work effectively as a group."
CNBC Arabiya in United Arab Emirates launched in late June as the region's first and only 24 hour, free-to-air economic and financial news channel. Broadcasting from Dubai Media City in Arabic, with bureaus in Bahrain, Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Jeddah and Riyadh as well as reporting teams in London and New York, the channel focuses on the economic context of regional business and political events. ENPS drives BDL prompters and Collage character generators and is integrated with an IBIS automation system.
"We chose ENPS largely because of its flexibility and ability to interface with other systems in the newsroom, and because of its track record with systems integration," said Ward Edmonds, Director of Programming. "Its interface, while unique, is intuitive and has proven relatively easy for our staff to pick up, some of whom have not worked in a live newsroom environment before. A proven ability to support Arabic scripts was also key to our selection process."
"In newsrooms around the world, ENPS means better ways of writing, editing, and producing and empowers reporters, writers, editors and producers with a simple, efficient, integrated workflow," said Lee Perryman, Deputy Director of AP's Broadcast division and Director of Broadcast Technology.
Easy-to-use ENPS features include management of rundowns, planning, contacts, messaging, news wires, third-party device control, scripting in almost any language, and no-compromise remote access capabilities for field staff. SNAPfeed, the latest extension to the ENPS DNA platform, allows journalists in the field to send video back into ENPS and compatible play-to-air servers directly from their laptop computer.
Newly-integrated ENPS publishing features allow formatting of content for the Internet, wireless PDAs, mobile phones and print systems. By far the most advanced set of such features offered in a broadcast newsroom computer system, output of text and media content can be customized for internal users, reporters and producers in the field, and the public.
AP provides technology for many of the world’s largest and most demanding broadcasters, and the ENPS system is now used by more than 43,000 reporters, writers, editors and producers in 42 countries.