Is Your Newsroom Ready for Live Streaming’s Rise?

From the 2017 presidential inauguration to the massive protests in Romania to the controversial shooting death of Philando Castile — developing stories are now being shaped and shared in real time via live-streaming platforms in ways newsrooms have never experienced.

Thanks to live-streaming services like Facebook Live, Periscope and Instagram Live, everyone with a smartphone and Wi-Fi can now be a broadcaster. Business Insider reports that “streaming video already accounts for over two-thirds of all internet traffic, and this share is expected to jump 82% by 2020.”  

A live-streaming world requires live-time technology, and live-streamed content has become a new and unruly firehose of communication. So how can journalists effectively navigate these vast streams — parsing out the noise to hone in on the most important signals? The process of production and the need for expensive equipment and pre-production planning are all but eliminated. Now when a story breaks, coverage can begin immediately, therefore eliminating the old processes of production and the need for expensive equipment. Everyone from experts to eyewitnesses can weigh in from wherever they happen to be.

Integrating a detection platform like Banjo into your newsroom helps you manage the overwhelming influx of streaming content surfacing from around the globe to power newsrooms to break events as they happen.

Capturing live-streaming video allows for newsroom efficiency.

 During the February tornado outbreak in New Orleans, newsrooms turned to Banjo to filter and isolate all public, live-streaming video surfacing from the area for a true, on-the-ground perspective of the storm. Finding public, social content by location allowed them to get the quickest handle on the developing event and the intelligence to know where to deploy teams quickly and efficiently.

Break the story before the competition.

Today, citizens are picking up their phones to live-stream breaking events, sometimes even before dialing 911. Banjo’s artificial intelligence detects a breaking event through video and image recognition — fires, floods, shootings, evacuations, and more.

Last July, a Dallas station went live on air immediately after receiving a Banjo alert containing live-streaming video of the deadly ambush attack of Dallas police officers during a police brutality protest. By using Banjo, they were the first to break what quickly became a national story.

Contact key eyewitnesses.

User generated content (UGC) is the most authentic and unique perspective of any developing story. When reporters do not have immediate physical access to a large breaking event, with one-click in the Banjo platform, they can contact any public user that is live-streaming from the location.

When users began posting about the tragic shooting at the Fort Lauderdale Airport in January, it was live-streaming video that first identified victims of the attack as well as a detailed suspect description. It didn’t matter if you were in Florida or France, newsrooms using Banjo were able to instantly reach out to the public user who posted the video to get more information as well as permission to use his or her content.

Know what’s happening, anywhere, anytime, before anyone else.
Live-streaming video detection is just one of the many ways Banjo powers newsrooms to break the story before the competition. Banjo technology ingests billions of live public digital signals like emergency services, social media, traffic, weather, and many other data sources to alert newsrooms to breaking events happening in the locations they care about. No longer do teams need separate programs and platforms to track news during breaking events — it can all be found in one spot: Banjo.

Victor Hernandez is media innovations director at Banjo.