VICE News Selects Octopus 8 Newsroom System

See Octopus Newsroom on booth SL11021, NAB Las Vegas, April 24-27

Above image shows Octopus support team members Lukas Kotek (on left) and Ciprian Lupsa taking a break between providing training sessions at VICE Media in Brooklyn.

New York City, USA, April 10, 2017 - Digital media and broadcasting company VICE Media has invested in Octopus 8 newsroom software for its headquarters in Brooklyn, New York City. Octopus 8 is being used by journalists producing newscasts for transmission over the Home Box Office (HBO) cable and satellite television network in the US and on VICELAND internationally.

VICE content will be sourced from news facilities in the USA, China and the Middle East, says Octopus Newsroom sales director Gabriel Jank . Octopus 8 is being operated in tandem with Vizrts Viz Pilot graphics and Viz One asset manager. This combination enables editors to select video material from Viz One and add graphics from Viz Pilot, all via a single interface. Commands from a Viz Mosart are already preconfigured in Octopus story templates and story elements so there is no need to call any plugin or select anything from the media library.

VICE originated as a magazine and is now a hugely diverse multimedia company, adds Lucy Paynter, real-time graphics art director at VICE. In October, we debuted a live news program, VICE News Tonight, which airs weeknights on HBO. Our aim is to provide a fresh perspective on what is happening in the world and to present it in a way that is engaging and up to the production standards of VICE and HBO. Its been challenging to combine a flexible and intuitive control-room based workflow with traditional documentary post-production and our methods are constantly evolving. Viz Mosart automation allows us to set up a playout environment that is predictable and perfectly timed, but its really Octopus that drives the front end of the show. By making use of custom fields and scripts within Octopus, weve been able to give the user the ability to select content-driven transitions and define the overall pace. The result, we hope, is a complete 20 to 30 minute program in which the individual elements are blended seamlessly and are imperceptible to the viewer.

The first news program of its kind to air on HBO, VICE News Tonight provides up-to-date news to viewers who have grown increasingly skeptical of the daily broadcast news format. Each half-hour edition of VICE News Tonight features intrepid and investigative journalism with hard-hitting storytelling. Airing five nights a week, the newscast breaks major stories while engaging its audience in an entertaining and provocative way. Distinguishing itself from the format of traditional daily TV newscasts, the show has no anchor and instead uses correspondent-reported field pieces, newsmaker interviews and profiles, animation and graphics, plus from-the-desk reports.

Available for Apple OS X, Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems, Octopus 8 gives newsroom staff the ability to ingest all incoming audio, video and still-image files, news agency wires, RSS feeds, emails, SMS messages and even faxes. All content relating to a specific task can be seen in a single view. Octopus 8 is fully MOS compliant system so can be integrated into any environment or workflow that supports the MOS protocol. The system can easily integrate with existing and new MOS devices. It fully supports the placeholder workflow, thumbnails and proxy preview, item status, channel assignments and many other commands.

Established in 1999, Octopus Newsroom (www.octopus-news.com) is the leading producer of standalone newsroom computer systems. Octopus Newsroom advocates an open ecosystem using the MOS protocol which enables customers to choose freely among high-quality providers of graphics, playout, MAM, prompters, traffic-handing and advertising solutions. Octopus Newsroom has successfully installed systems into more than 200 channels around the world. Based on Unicode, Octopus Newsroom products support all major character sets including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese.

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