BOSTON—In the aftermath of the Boston
Marathon bombing on April 15, user-generated
video would come to tell a big part of the story,
as eyewitnesses uploaded photos and footage
shot on cellphones, smartphones and other mobile
devices to social media, YouTube and local
news stations.
Local ABC affiliate WCVB Channel 5 began
to see a steady uptick in user submissions, some
on the 15th but increasingly more over the next
few days. “As people began to look at what they
had shot, they began to realize they had pictures
germane to the bombing,” said Neil Ungurleider,
WCVB manager of digital. “In one case a user had
a photo of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev fleeing the scene,
but didn’t realize what it was until a few days
later. After the suspects were identified, that picture
became very meaningful.”
![](https://web.archive.org/web/20131017061123im_/http://www.tvtechnology.com/portals/4/TVT 10_16_13_final-19.jpg) |
Keith Wymbs, vice president of marketing for Elemental Technologies |
But for the Hearst Television-owned station,
the most telling videos would come in on Friday,
April 19, from the residents of Watertown, Mass., where the manhunt for the two
suspects culminated in a community lock-down
and a firefight. The station received
about a dozen videos shot by residents
trapped inside their homes while law enforcement
and the suspects traded fire outside.
With no media access to the scene—
“correctly so,” Ungurleider noted—and
the fluid nature of the story, those videos
shot by citizens through their windows
provided the best vantage point as events
unfolded.
“You heard the gunfire and the explosions,”
Ungurleider said of the videos. “The
experience was something none of us had
ever seen, and we realized what we were
doing was important work that needed to
be done very well and we needed to apply
all of our journalistic standards to doing it.”
FADE INTO THE BACKGROUND
From a newsroom perspective, the technology
platform that enabled WCVB to
go live with broadcast-quality versions of
those videos was among the unsung heroes
in the story. In the midst of preparing viewer-
submitted content for air, the myriad
technical challenges of transcoding video
must fade into the background as the focus
becomes vetting the material’s relevance,
newsworthiness and authenticity in near-real
time.
“The station was able to tell the story
through many different eyes very quickly
through user-generated video,” said Joe Addalia,
director of technology, Hearst Television
Inc. “From a technologist’s point of
view, I found it incredibly interesting as
a prime example of how the traditional
means of gathering news is really no longer
traditional—it’s all untraditional.”
Large station groups like Hearst and
other news organizations have embraced
user-generated video—and citizen journalism
on a broader level—as an essential
reporting tool. They’re providing viewers
with online submission platforms and tying
those systems seamlessly into newsroom
production for output on-air and/or online.
Hearst, for example, developed “u local”
about five years ago, Addalia said, to enable
its 29 stations nationwide to collect user-generated
videos and photos. U local is
featured on each station’s website and integrated
into locally branded apps. At the local
level, usage typically spikes during major
weather events, when citizen reporting
can bring remote stories to life.
Similarly, CNN’s iReport platform, created
by Turner Broadcasting’s BEST (Broadcasting
Engineering and Systems Technology)
group, is now in its second generation.
Available on CNN websites internationally
and distributed via a number of CNN apps,
it sees about 500 user submissions a day
worldwide.
![](https://web.archive.org/web/20131017061123im_/http://www.tvtechnology.com/portals/4/TVT 10_16_13_final-20.jpg) |
For WCVB Channel 5 in Boston, user-generated video played an important role in the station’s coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing in April. |
NBC News’ acquisition of user-generated
video service Stringwire in August signals it
is also looking closely at how to integrate
citizen journalism more tightly into its
news ecosphere. Stringwire’s technology
enables the collection of live video from
around the world from a verified network
of contributors via Twitter, making it ideal
“for breaking news and stories that have
a real-time visual component,” NBC News
said in its announcement. (Beyond that initial
announcement, NBC News has been
mum on its plans and declined to comment
for this article.)
INCREASING CHOICES
While user-generated video has become
a standard component of news coverage,
the technological challenges of transcoding
and managing it for broadcast playout are
only increasing as the plethora of devices,
operating systems, and formats available to
consumers multiplies. Each of those factors
complicates the process of converting the
video from the vast array of mobile video
formats to broadcast-quality.
Once the video is transcoded and distributed
to the newsroom, metadata is essential
to vetting and managing it. Best collected
at the time the video is uploaded, metadata
is what enabled WCVB, for instance, to get
those sensitive Watertown videos on-air as
the dire situation was unfolding.
Systems are typically best-of-breed solutions,
combining software developed inhouse
with off-the-shelf products to provide
newsrooms a soup-to-nuts system for
transcoding and moving the video. Leading
vendors of transcoding products include
Telestream, Elemental Technologies, Harmonic,
Matrox, Snell and Digital Rapids,
among others.
Turner built CNN’s iReport from scratch
because at the time (2006), it was the only
option, but in general the company develops
most of its systems in-house. “If we
were doing it all again from scratch today,
there are lots of vendors out there,” said
Chris Hinton, Turner Broadcasting vice
president of software development. “But
with our scale, our size, most vendors can’t
deal with the complexity and breadth of
our organization.”
The operational burden of managing
user-submitted content is often overlooked,
Hinton said. While most U.S. adults have
smartphones, most are not professional
shooters. Informing citizen journalists
about what is and isn’t usable can go a long
way toward easing that burden.
“People don’t know how to shoot video;
they jiggle the camera, they move it around,
so you can have unstable video that’s not
great on-air when it’s blown up,” Hinton
explained. “We spend time getting users to
understand how to shoot video and images,
and not to shoot in portrait mode.”
Efforts like those are important as the
definition of what constitutes “user-generated”
video is evolving as quickly as the
enabling technology. The once clearly identifiable
line between professional and user-generated
content is much less distinct.
“It used to be really clear back 10 years
ago: What people created for their own purposes
vs. what was shot by a professional;
one for capturing a moment, and one for
distribution,” said Keith Wymbs, vice president
of marketing, Elemental Technologies
in Portland, Ore. “But with the advent of
citizen journalists, the lines are blurring…
and there’s been a push to encourage prosumers,
to helping those individuals have
a means of distributing their content and
constantly educating that base.”
CONTENT IS STILL KING
But the bottom line when it comes to
getting user-generated video on-air is the
value of the content itself. “If it’s a great video,
[the producer] will run through fire to
get it on-air, and it has little to do with what
technology is available,” said John Pallett, director
of product management, enterprise
products, at Telestream in Nevada City, Calif.
“They will use whatever they have to get it
on-air if it’s really good stuff.”
WCVB’s Ungurleider noted that television
viewers have a higher tolerance for
video quality in breaking-news situations.
In the case of the Watertown coverage, he
said, user-generated video “was the only visual
account of what was going on, and the
video being unsteady or out of focus was
not a consideration when putting it on TV.”
“Citizen journalism is an unstoppable
freight train,” Turner’s Hinton said. “It is going
to get huge, and organizations that don’t
embrace it and are not actively engaged in
it will get left behind.”