Rather than rescheduling NAB Show for later this year, NAB will create a new digital offering called NAB Show Express, and will enhance its NAB Show New York later this year.

NBC News said on Friday that one of its employees, longtime audio technician Larry Edgeworth, has died after testing positive for the coronavirus. Larry Edgeworth, a sound technician for NBC News’s Rockefeller Plaza headquarters for the past 25 years, suffered from other health issues, his wife said, according to a memo sent by NBC News President Andrew Lack.

Of all the newsroom jobs, producing newscasts would seem to be one of the toughest to do from a kitchen table, but Wednesday, for the first time, WSMV Nashville producer Jules Marcantonio did just that. “It went fine, on both ends,” Marcantonio said, “from both my perspective and the station’s.”

Broadcasters including Gray Television and Cox Media Group have been beta testing the new Facebook Messenger Experience app from Social News Desk enabling users to opt in for breaking news and customized content. With 1.3 billion global Messenger users and a 50%-80% open rate, it opens a key new front to reach viewers, particularly as the coronavirus crisis escalates.

Patrick Hanrahan and Edwin Catmull won the major technology prize for their contributions to 3D computer graphics used in movies and video games.

CBC adviser and news technologist Bruce MacCormack warns that deep fake videos have gotten more sophisticated and difficult to detect. Their creators are also proliferating, he says, and news organizations need to begin arming themselves against what could be “an existential threat” to their legitimacy.

Business motives, including increased utilization and flexibility plus easier maintenance and scalability, are driving TV’s move to software. With SMPTE’s ST2110 suite and other standards reaching maturity and diffusing into the marketplace, it’s now becoming practical to support entire live production workloads on virtual machines.

Good news for the millions who suddenly find themselves working from home in the new coronavirus age: the core of the U.S. internet network can handle the virus-related surge in demand it now faces as it has evolved to be able to easily handle bandwidth-hungry streaming services. The caveat is video conferencing may stumble if too many people in one household try to do it at once, but otherwise experts say the system is “massively over-provisioned.”

In order to mitigate the effect of not attending NAB Show 2020, Ross will be running a series of online presentations, webinars and demonstrations to ensure that our partners and customers can still learn about our new solutions and how we remain committed to the live production industry.

With the CBS Broadcast Center in New York City essentially out of commission while it’s cleaned, the network’s flagship affiliate WCBS originated its newscasts from KCBS Los Angeles March 12 and 13.

News of the NAB Show’s cancellation Wednesday left the show’s organizers, vendors and broadcasters scrambling to calculate their losses and frame out alternatives to conduct crucial business usually handled there.

Artificial intelligence continues to help news organizations automate more taxing workflows. AI is making ongoing progress with autoclipping to generate news and sports highlights, metadata tagging and accelerating live research and real time content indexing. It’s also pushing into new fronts like delivering smooth slow motion without a super slow motion camera. Above: AI drives EVS’s new Overcam for offside camera positions during soccer games and reduces the need for camera operators for those locations.

Policymakers “need to take a fresh look at existing allocations of spectrum, including the allocation of spectrum to broadcasters” to determine if “that spectrum is still needed by the broadcast industry or if it is better used in other areas,” said Jim Ciconni, senior EVP of AT&T at a Washington think tank event.