Hearst Television Gets Serious About OTT

TV stations and station groups don’t have to disrupt their newsrooms and ad scheduling workflows to publish live local newscasts and on-demand news via their websites, social media and mobile apps if the rollout of Verizon Digital Media Services’ OTT platform by Hearst Television’s 26 news-producing stations is any indication.

This week the company and station group jointly announced completion of Verizon Digital Media Services’ Slicer platform to repackage on-air news for digital distribution and handle online ad insertion and playback. 

“Hearst brought us in not to replace its existing news and ad workflows or duplicate them, but to plug directly into them with as little effort as possible,” says Darren Lepke, director of marketing at Verizon Digital Media Services.

Mike Rosellini, VP, digital media at Hearst Television, describes deployment of Verizon’s HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) adaptive bit rate-based platform as being “relatively simple” and attributes the painless rollout to an overall consistency in the “upstream stack” of technology used in Hearst Television newsrooms and traffic departments.

For news, the Verizon platform performs two major functions: enabling newscasts to be streamed at just about the exact moment they make air and slicing those newscasts into discrete stories that viewers can access on-demand from their digital platforms and via social media.

To make that happen, Lepke says, the Verizon platform inputs an HD-SDI output of a newscast, encapsulates and encrypts it into IP and transports it to the cloud where it is recorded.

Live newscasts can be streamed from the cloud to viewers near real time, and digital editors at Hearst Television stations can begin accessing individual stories in the newscasts from the cloud within minutes.

Video clips can be inserted into written stories on station websites, pushed to mobile devices or syndicated to other sites, like YouTube or NewsOn, the local TV OTT news service Hearst Television and four other station groups founded a year ago, Rosellini says.

“It’s a really fast workflow. You can probably rip a clip [from a newscast in the cloud] in less than 30 seconds,” he says.

That gives stations the ability to publish a story from a newscast to their own websites in a couple of minutes and to post stories on a social media site in less than five, Rosellini says.

Entire newscasts also can be streamed on-demand from the cloud moments after they’ve concluded, he adds.

For ads, the Verizon Digital Media Services platform integrates with existing ad scheduling systems and relies on SCTE triggers already used in on-air newscasts to signal breaks.

“There are subtle differences from station to station when it comes to getting [commercial] break triggers over the [Verizon platform] uplink or scheduling information to communicate when it is supposed to be running a stream versus not running a stream,” Rosellini says.

But once Hearst Television “templatized integration” of the platform into its news and ad scheduling systems during tests last fall at its West Orlando, Fla., station, deploying the platform at all of the group’s news-producing station was “a rinse-and-repeat process,” he adds.

Even if the differences in the scheduling technology had been greater from station to station, it would have been relatively simple to integrate the Verizon platform,” Rosellini says.

“It’s very well documented,” providing the information needed to “connect into the [Verizon] API” to drive online commercial breaks and start and stop newscasts at the right times for ads “so that a person doesn’t have to sit there and manage breaks manually,” he says.

Commercials are uploaded ahead of time to the cloud with the Verizon platform, which makes it simple to replace individual commercials or entire commercial “pods” dynamically without human intervention, Rosellini says.

While the platform can target advertising to individual viewers based on demographic information they provide when registering to watch news online or via an app, Hearst Television currently is not taking customized ad playback to that level. However, the station group may personalize commercial playback “down the road,” he says.

The Verizon Digital Media Services platform provides server-side commercial insertion, something that is increasingly valuable as ad-blocking software plays an ever larger role in digital media, Lepke says.

By inserting commercials on the server, the Verizon platform provides a continuous stream of data — both news content and ads — to digital devices used by the public.

The alternative means of commercial insertion happens on what’s called “the client side,” or the device playing back the stream. With that approach, the player must recognize markers alerting it to an impending ad break, call out to an ad server for commercial content and insert it on the device, he says.

“It’s those kinds of signals the ad-blockers listen for. They listen for the API calls out to the known ad providers.”

The continuous stream of data from the server not only makes it possible to sidestep ad-blockers but also avoids spinning-wheel, buffering-type interruptions associated with client-side ad insertion. That directly translates into a viewing experience on a digital device that’s more akin to what viewers expect when watching television, Lepke says.

While generating additional commercial revenue and providing Hearst Television stations with a means to offer news in a station-branded environment and are important, they aren’t the only benefits the Verizon platform delivers, Rosellini says. “With the Verizon stack we can do newscast distribution beyond just the sites and apps branded by the station for consumption primarily in the DMA where the user base is.”

One example, NewsOn, presents livestreaming newscasts and on-demand streams on iOS, Android and Roku platforms.

By relying on HLS adaptive bitrate streaming, it is simple for partners to work with digital content provided by Hearst Television, Rosellini says.

“So, as far as getting more exposure [for Hearst Television news content], the Verizon platform is using HLS streaming that can be played through most any player SDK [software development kit] with HLS support,” he says.

“Most partners can work with that stream. You can just hand them the stream to integrate. So if you are looking to get video beyond your branded properties, the [Verizon] uplink stack is very helpful.”

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