Engineering Update: Dalet Helps Broadcasters Add User-Generated Content to Their Newscasts

These days more and more stations are incorporating social media posting within their newscast in order to engage their audiences on a deeper and more personal level. The process for doing so has not been easy, unless you have an IT background.

Addressing this, Dalet Digital Media Systems, a provider of Media Asset Management solutions, software and services has joined with Filemobile, a software company based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada that specializes in interactive online solutions.

Using Filemobile Social Feeds, broadcasters can harness the power of social media to increase their content inventory and extend social marketing capabilitie. The new partnership has resulted in the integration of user-generated content (UGC) into the news workflow using Dalet News Suite and Filemobile solutions. Filemobile is a platform for gathering, organizing and broadcasting social content that allows users to source content from a variety of places, including the audience's desktop, mobile and social networks.

To be featured at the upcoming NAB 2014 exhibition (Dalet booth SL2725), the new combined Dalet-Filemobile solution offers an easy way to leverage UGC from capture to multi-platform distribution.

For breaking and planned news events, the newsroom team identifies the coordinates of citizen journalists and deploys geo-specific mobile alerts, motivating them to capture pictures or videos via the Filemobile app for iOS and Android. Using Filemobile Media Factory, news staff reviews, approves and organizes the UGC for potential news packages. The curated material is automatically transferred to the Dalet News Suite content catalogue and immediately available for production. Journalists use Dalet's editing tools to quickly create compelling stories using a mix of user-generated and professionally gathered content.

In addition, the Dalet-Filemobile integration serves as a dedicated contribution tool to facilitate a flow of qualified content into the newsroom from journalists and freelancers covering specific events.

Filemobile's Media Factory platform has been deployed at Gannett, Fox News, Wall Street Journal, Hearst TV, Network 10, CTV, CBC, and The Weather Network.