Latakoo Manifest Allows Intelligent Broadcast Story Tracking

Latakoo, a developer of software workflow solutions for the broadcast and production industry, today announced the launch of Latakoo Manifest, a tool for intelligent indexing of content before it is collected. This index facilitates the sharing of media within large organizations, such as television station groups, that are spread out over a wide geographic area.

Television station groups today grow large through acquisitions that produce a mixture of broadcast technology and networking conditions. This technology diversity makes it difficult to communicate the day’s assignments and share content between stations during a newsday’s tight timelines, limiting a broadcaster’s ability to maximize economies of scale.

The Latakoo video transfer platform already provides a bridge between diverse technologies, making it easy to send video from the field to any station, or from a station to any other station, delivering content in the format desired by the receiver and ingested directly into their asset manager.

Latakoo Manifest adds a feed of updatable beginning-of-shift assignments. These can be added directly by news managers or synced from existing assignments systems through Latakoo’s data broker. The system alerts news crews of their assignments, and tracks progress on the story throughout the day.

Within the Latakoo platform, its mobile applications and synced newsroom computer systems, Manifest promotes discovery of assignments early in the day across a large organization through consistent categorization of content by subject and region combined with robust search. Once discovered, producers can follow a story to receive updates and request the automated delivery of the content once created.

Latakoo Manifest works alongside another new product, Latakoo Wires, which creates an organizational newsfeed — adopting standard newsfeed templates — that publishes assignment indexes, as well as a complete organization’s video, scripts, and other metadata in a form that can be accessed through AP’s ENPS and Avid’s iNEWS as well as other newsroom computer systems.

Manifest is fully Media Object Server (MOS) compliant and completely integrated with ENPS. Data seamlessly syncs between the two systems in real time regardless of which system gets updated. Manifest allows news crews to access the feed in whatever technology they prefer.

The Latakoo Manifest product is currently being beta-tested by two major broadcasters and is available for licensing.

“We have customers who need real-time understanding of where video content resides and at what stage a story may be for collaboration purposes,” said Jade Kurian, founder and president of Latakoo. “We’re enabling producers, editors, and remote location crews to have complete transparency and collaborative communication.”

Latakoo Manifest further accelerates production collaboration for rapid notification for content that needs, for example, to be delivered to online or on social media feeds using the Latakoo platform, which removes the need for re-uploading or re-encoding content.

“The broadcast market needs to serve multiple audiences and a wide range of outlets, and Latakoo Manifest is the best tool for just-in-time video collaboration,” said Paul Adrian, CEO of Latakoo. “We created a platform for accelerated video transfer, and now we’ve brought it full circle, offering complete insight into what and where the project or story is from birth to broadcast.”