The annual IT Broadcast Workflow conference, organised by TVBEurope, has become the most important forum to discuss the latest in collaborative systems and file-based infrastructures. This year’s event is on 13 June at BAFTA in London, and registration is now open. With major sporting events including football and the Olympics taking place in the coming months the programme includes a number of case studies and broadcaster presentations from leading organisations including Supersport South Africa, ITV, ITN and BBC Sport. Broadcast facilities are also covered, including a debate on metadata and content management led by ITFC from the UK. A new addition to the conference programme is a look at collaborative news production, using the BBC Journalism Portal as the reference. The presentation will be by Paul Visuri, consulting director at Sharepoint City, which is working with the BBC on the designs. The requirement is for a flexible and living web-based system for collaborative working that can change as the needs of the organisation change. The BBC’s aspiration is to bring together all the production tools a journalist needs for video, audio and the web, delivering them as lightweight web applications through the portal and thus accessible anywhere. The idea is that not only can the journalist draw from and contribute to all media – a mash-up of timely and relevant information – but that the BBC can also create mash-ups from around the whole of the organisation. The presentation will show how the design can cut through the technical complexities to deliver tools which are relevant and appealing to journalists.
