Dalet Debuts Pyramid For Remote Collaboration, Multiplatform Delivery

A new news production and distribution product modernizes newsroom workflows and includes a “digital first” focus.

The cloud-native solution, which aims to alleviate some of the pressure newsrooms face to deliver content to multiple platforms, reflects a shift in Dalet’s approach to product development. The new product is easy to use, harnesses the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and facilitates collaboration and remote workflows.

“Newsrooms are under continuous pressure to deliver to more platforms” at a time when they have lower budgets and fewer people, Bea Alonso, Dalet’s chief market officer, says. “We saw the problems.”

Dalet wanted to bring a solution to newsrooms that offered flexibility, agility and collaboration, among other things.

In 2020, Dalet announced it was completely modernizing its newsroom tool suites and seeking feedback for an offering called Dalet Pyramid. The tool, which is now available, represents “modern thinking in how the newsroom should be run,” Alonso says.

And Dalet Pyramid itself is “fundamentally different from any newsroom solution that Dalet has had,” she adds.

The scalable cloud-native solution is offered both under a subscription and SaaS model, Alonso says. This flexibility makes it possible to temporarily add new licenses for the duration of a special event, like the Olympics, she says. As SaaS, Dalet Pyramid transfers the responsibility for architecture and infrastructure from the broadcaster to Dalet, Alonso says, to allow “newsrooms to focus on creating content.”

The development of Pyramid reflects a change in how Dalet approaches product development, she notes. Over the last couple of years, she says, Dalet has shifted to being “more user focused than product focused.”

Last year, Dalet announced to the market that it was working on the Pyramid solution and wanted “the market to tell us how we should evolve this tool,” she says.

Pyramid already included a “digital first” philosophy first when Dalet solicited feedback on the offering, Alonso says. Digital first paves the way for different teams to collaborate on the same story and leverage from one another to create a story for different outlets, she says.

Potential users “really liked the fact that you can work across teams and platforms, including digital teams, and that the digital team doesn’t need its own storytelling and creation platform and can work together with the television team,” she says.

Another bit of feedback centered on having an easy user interface.

“It was important to make the user interface independent of the platform where it was running,” whether that was a specific operating system or a laptop, desktop, mobile or tablet, she says. “That was a huge finding for us.”

And while Dalet designed the user interface to be browser-based, market feedback indicated it also had to be very intuitive for new users so they didn’t have to spend a lot of time being trained on the tools, she says. Instead, she said, the interface had to be intuitive in the same way that mobile phone apps are intuitive.

Potential users also wanted access to the power of AI through Pyramid, she says.

“A lot of AI-driven automation has been included in the solution in the last few months based on user input,” Alonso says.

Pyramid also needed to prioritize remote workflows and enable collaboration, she says, adding that a web-based editor makes it possible to edit remotely, and Trello-like planning boards assists with allocating tasks and resources.

Pyramid is compatible with Dalet Galaxy five and offers new tools for planning, digital production, editing and remote contribution that Galaxy doesn’t have, she says.

Alonso says the initial focus will be to work with some existing Galaxy customers to add on those tools and gradually transition them to Pyramid.

“We learned what works and doesn’t work in the newsroom,” she says. Pyramid “is our response to that.”