NEVADA CITY, Calif.—Telestream announced it has begun shipping ScreenFlow 9, the latest version of its video editing and screen recording software for the Mac.

ScreenFlow 9 makes it easy for users to create high-quality, professional videos, the company said. Version 9 adds new streamlined editing tools, multiscreen recording capability, a new clip editor and a high-resolution proxy editing workflow.

“The new features in ScreenFlow 9 focus on enabling users to create even more professional looking content that engages and retains viewers’ attention,” says Bryce Stejskal, product manager at Telestream. “Thanks in part to our passionate customer base, ScreenFlow continues to evolve to be the perfect communications tool for users wanting to communicate with video, while avoiding the complexities frequently associated with other video editing applications.”

ScreenFlow was created for marketers, educators, online-trainers, Vloggers and others needing an easy screen recording and video editing application, the company said.

New ScreenFlow 9 features include:

• Multiscreen recording, which gives users the ability to take advantage of more screen space to lay out various applications to help viewers follow processes or take note of more examples;
• Timeline tool palette, offering new editing tools, such as Hand, Zoom, Blade and Track Select.
• Proxy editing, which can reduce CPU demands when editing high-resolution images and allows users to edit more demanding content on less powerful systems;
• Clip editor, which makes it possible to preview clips and trim them to size before dropping them onto a timeline; and
• New click effects, which allow users to customize cursor looks and adjust size, color, duration and blur during screen recording.

ScreenFlow 9, which starts at $129, also includes updates for the latest Mac OS, updated capture card support, thumbnail image improvements and manual media management. Telestream is offering the latest version with the option of a $60 annual subscription to a comprehensive stock media library with unlimited access to more than 500,000 pieces of media.

The company is making a trial version available as a download, as well as selling the full version online.

NEW YORK—As NBC’s iconic “Saturday Night Live” approached its 40th anniversary earlier this year, the idea of creating an app came up. But, says Michael Martin, senior vice president, product, technology & operations at NBC Entertainment Digital, they had to think long and hard about whether to proceed. “Consumers are much more discerning and careful as to whether they want to go through the steps of downloading an app and taking up phone storage,” he says. “The bar is pretty high nowadays.” Discoverability is also an issue; experts estimate there are more than 3 million total apps for Apple and Android.

A successful app, Martin and his group decided, had to fulfill two criteria: It had to perform a utility really well and communicate that utility easily, and the assets had to be unique enough to merit its own app. Forty years of SNL has produced 800 episodes with roughly 6,000 individual comedy sketches. But the library had already been digitally available for some time, and Martin was troubled at how viewers consumed the content. “Fundamentally people were snacking on that content,” he said. “The consumption would be to watch one or less than one clip of the newest, latest, most topical video.”

Michael Martin, senior vice president, product, technology & operations at NBC Entertainment Digital

A MYRIAD OF DESCRIPTIONS
How to make every season and every sketch more discoverable and valuable was the challenge. One advantage the digital group had was NBC’s 40 years of audience research. The first important piece of information gleaned was just how much more varied the sketches were, by season, cast members, guest stars, topics, categories and many other factors. “We realized that there were scores, if not hundreds of facets that could describe an individual sketch,” he says. “We needed something different than the typical recommendation engines, based on commonality in consumption patterns. Those patterns didn’t hold for this content.”

They hired what they called a “metadata army” of people who took four months to go through all 6,000 sketches, recataloguing them for the hundreds of defined facets. “The semantic model is very flexible,” said Martin. “It isn’t just the facets that are important but their relationship to one another.” The sketches were ultimately connected by 33,000 relationships. “It became an incredibly dense model, so we can take some of what we learned from audience research and put a prediction engine on top of it,” he adds.

Eddie Lee, vice president of technology for NBC Entertainment Digital, was responsible for building the prediction engine from scratch. “We tried to apply and re-use some of the traditional, off-the-shelf recommendation engines, but they couldn’t deal with our model,” Lee says.

The app and website—powered by the MarkLogic Enterprise NoSQL database platform— integrate, manage and search the database. “Building the prediction engine took two to three months, constructing and iterating it,” he said. “It included connection between the CMS [content management system] and the database, built on top of MarkLogic using our resources and our set of rules.” The system also has enterprise traits for security, data integrity, and scalability.

More than 100 million clips have been streamed since the SNL Official App was released in February.

SWIPING FOR APPROVAL
Also critical was an interface mechanism that let users interact with the content, and, the team hoped, turn a snack into a meal. The User Experience team came up with a gesture-based function that provided real- time feedback to the engine. “We didn’t want to give the user a choice of thumbs up or thumbs down,” Martin said. “The user wouldn’t just perceive that as work but it’s too simplistic to get the outcome we were looking for.”
Instead, if the viewer swipes left, he or she gets a new video. “If you’ve watched 75 percent of that first video, we assume that you liked most of it and will harvest facets that we’ll serve in the second and third video,” says Martin. “If you swipe it very quickly, we assume that you didn’t like that one whatsoever and revise the model accordingly. And if you swipe five or six videos very quickly, we’ll put you on another path, in a totally non-technical way.”

Swiping up and down to add to favorites is another way that the app signals viewer preferences about the sketches. “We built that interface into a product in a way that we don’t have to spend any time up front to explain it to the consumer,” said Martin. “But it also results in a high-quality data stream.” He also notes that the data is completely anonymous. The UE design was recently nominated for an Interactive Emmy for outstanding user interface.

The response to the app has been stronger than Martin and his team could have anticipated. “We had over 100 million clips streamed to the app,” he said. “Most critical, we definitely unlocked binging. On average, people who were consuming less than one sketch in the past are now watching several to a dozen sketches.”

Since its February release, the team has continually updated the app and is now at version 1.3.1. “We’ve extended capabilities and added new features and polished some things to make predictions better,” Martin said. And the team has also prepared some entirely new features for the opening of SNL’s 41st season, Oct. 3. “We are adding new social features so people can share their personalized experiences with family and friends,” Martin added. “We’re also looking for the opportunity to get the cast and show more involved in curating and highlighting content. And our emoji library will expand to include new cast members.”

The app is free and available on iOS and Android (www.nbc.com/saturday-nightlive/app).

There’s plenty of news about broadcast news—specifically the shifting, often unexpected, redirection of TV newsgathering and distribution. And it’s not just putting news onto mobile or online sites or engaging in social media.

During a Media Institute panel “Survive or Thrive: The Future of Journalism” last month, TV and media veterans assessed the outlook. They barely scratched the surface given the overwhelming desire of media companies to attract millennial age audiences (18– to 35-year-olds).

This focus comes at a time when the visions for future tactics of many TV executives have failed. For example, “user-generated content” (UGC)—once expected to play a significant role in TV newscasting—has not developed; it is unlikely to be used for anything beyond opportunistic spot coverage, according to Tom Rosentiel, executive director of The American Press Institute. The longtime media researcher and reporter said that, beyond fortuitous uploads (such as when a passerby pulls out a smartphone to capture images of a “news event”), neither stations nor would-be contributors have been organized to develop a reliable stream of UGC.

Rosentiel’s views on the how TV news incorporates new tools were reflected by others on the legacy-heavy Media Institute panel. The session coincided with Sinclair Broadcast Group’s announcement that in October it will launch a weekly investigative journalism show, “Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson,” hosted by Attkisson, one of the panelists. The former CBS-TV correspondent describes her new 30-minute Sunday morning show, which will air on Sinclair stations nationwide, as one intended to “pierce secrecy and seek accountability from government, corporations and special interests.” The show will also be available via stations’ websites.

This year BuzzFeed has produced video interviews with President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron.TIME FOR AN OVERHAUL
Scott Livingston, vice president of news for Sinclair Broadcast Group, called “Full Measure” “serious journalism dedicated to serious topics that impact us all” and a sign of Sinclair’s dedication to reporting.

Sinclair’s tactic of contract production of a high-profile investigative journalism show is a prime example of the overhaul rippling through the journalism business.

Attkisson, a part-time Sinclair employee, declines to acknowledge a political slant to her program (which is being staffed in part by other former CBS colleagues). Observers expect that “Full Measure” will bring the perspective of politically right-leaning Sinclair. If so, it will expand the role of opinionated coverage—a direction already seen on Fox News, MSNBC and other channels.

Speaking of MSNBC, an overhaul is in the works there, starting with its name, a legacy of Microsoft’s investment in NBC, which was then owned by General Electric (how times change.) In recent weeks, Comcast (the current owner of NBCUniversal) has indicated that it will rebrand the news-commentary network.

Reports surfaced that Comcast may buy or make significant investments in Vice Media, BuzzFeed News or other digital media companies that crank out substantial quantities of video reports—from controversial documentaries to fluffy pop-culture segments, largely for Web distribution.

But Vice Media is also on TV. It produces “Vice,” an independent, weekly half-hour investigative series on, of all places, HBO, and recently unveiled substantial expansion deals. Vice Media will produce a nightly half-hour news show on HBO (start date undetermined), and also will create a new documentary channel that A&E Networks expects to debut in early 2016, replacing A&E’s current H2 channel. A&E bought a 10-percent stake in Vice Media last summer.

The new Vice channel is expected to focus on lifestyle documentary content— a far leap from Vice’s current HBO shows, which are heavy on political topics such as climate change, hunger, child exploitation and battle reports from war zones.

Vice Media and its partners have definitively enunciated that their target audiences are millennials. It’s no coincidence that Vice’s original show runs directly after Bill Maher’s “Real Time” on HBO on Friday nights (Maher is credited as an executive producer of the current shows).

Vice Media has also established a multiyear deal with Verizon Communications to supply digital content for Verizon’s new mobile-first video programming service.

HBO’s decision to use Vice Media for newscasts raised eyebrows among traditionalists who questioned why HBO’s parent company Time Warner would allow outside reporters to compete with its CNN subsidiary.

HBO CEO Richard Plepler, in a CNBC interview, characterized HBO as “not so much in the daily news business; we’re in the ‘Vice’ business.” He focused on Vice’s “unique voice in... storytelling” and, inevitably acknowledged its appeal to millennials. Plepler also suggested that future HBO news plans may encompass CNN, but he offered no details.

Plepler has not discussed a key factor in the HBO-Vice Media relationship: “HBO Now.” With its cord-cutting capability to reach non-cable subscribers, HBO Now provides the network with a way to get to mobile, portable and other devices—including with timely, short, topical programming that appeals to millennials.

‘HISTORIC SHIFT’
Meanwhile, BuzzFeed, the popular social media website known for its pop culture “listicles” and quizzes, is beefing up its video news operations.

“We’re in the midst of an historic shift in the media industry where news is increasingly being distributed on social networks and consumed on social devices; we believe BuzzFeed can [become] a preeminent media company,” said Chris Dixon, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm that recently invested an additional $50 million into BuzzFeed.

BuzzFeed’s flirtation with NBCUniversal or other traditional media outlets provides cross-platform options as well as bringing in millennial viewers. This year BuzzFeed has produced video interviews with President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron. The Cameron interview was the first international edition of BuzzFeed News. The online channel has also interviewed House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and entertainers such as Sir Ian McKellen, Sir Patrick Stewart and Jerry Seinfeld.

The Obama interview was tied to a BuzzFeed Motion Pictures production that was distributed on Facebook. BuzzFeed invited its social media audience to submit questions for the President.

BuzzFeed is also beefing up its data science capabilities, which could be used in the emerging data-driven journalism sector. The company acquired Torando Labs, a data engineering company, in late 2014.

A BuzzFeed spokeswoman insisted to me in July, that there is “no news to report yet on our plans around TV, but will keep you posted.” The operative word appears to be “yet.”

Admittedly, these activities at Vice Media, BuzzFeed and the “nonfiction” producers focus heavily on documentaries and soft news—not the timely, deadline spot reports that are the core of local and traditional network TV newscasts. Yet, the changing definition of “news” and the interests of millennials may well affect what broadcast networks and stations—and millennial-obsessed advertisers—consider to be “news.”

John Ford, a long-time Discovery, National Geographic and ION top executive, offered this perspective from his new role as general manager of the year-old Nonfiction Producers Association. Ford is also head of programming at Justice Network TV, a digital network carried on many Tegna TV channels (the new name for the former Gannett Co. spinoff that operates TV stations and digital properties).

“Nonfiction programs will change over time,” Ford told me, “Everyone is fearful that 25- to 34-year-olds aren’t going to be watching TV. They watch differently.” He emphasized that millennials watch conventional TV, but on their own terms, such as on-demand.

The challenge to nonfiction producers is finding the right mix of stories/topics, production values and millennial appeal— along with advertiser support, Ford said. He acknowledged that “there are a lot of gray areas” right now in delineating reality, documentary and information content.

Barbara Cochran, moderator of the Media Institute “Future of Journalism” event last month put it in context. Cochran, a Washington broadcast news executive at CBS-TV, NBC-TV and NPR, and now director of the University of Missouri’s Washington Journalism Program, characterized the “convergence concentration, or multimedia journalism.”

“Broadcast journalists need to learn to be platform-agnostic,” Cochran said in an interview after the Media Institute event. “This means understanding what storytelling techniques work for each platform and being reasonably adept at all.” She also cited the value of “understanding how to harness data for storytelling and infographics”— skills that tie closely to social media.

Cochran’s summary reflects the shift likely to reshape TV news in the years ahead.

“The lines that used to sharply delineate one medium from another have become so fuzzy as to be non-existent,” she said.

Gary Arlen is president of Arlen Communications LLC, a research and consulting firm. He can be reached atwww.ArlenCom.com.