The Era Of Satellite News Gathering

swimgeek writes "The TV Technology for covering news as it happens is changing. This article specifically talks about the transition from ENG (Electronic News Gathering) to SNG (Satellite News Gathering). The American TV networks are close to spending $100 million for this transition, anticipating a possible war in Iraq."

just goes to prove....

[Lord_Slepnir]

...that there are two things that drive techology forward: Porn and War. Before you laugh, think about this internet that you're on right now. It was a military network, set up so that we could maintain communications, even in the event of a nuclear attack. Then think about why it was expanded so much, because people needed more bandwith for streaming video, images, etc.

Think of all of those fancy moon rockets, which were produced on top of all the reasearch German Military engineers did. Even the safety glass in your car was invented for gas masks long before it was in a car.

When the next great leap in technology takes forward, it will be related either to (a)people killing each other or (b) people looking at each other naked.

media coverage

[Senator_B]

Although all these new advances in technology are pretty cool, and the leap from what reporters were using last year is exponential, I still get the feeling that between all the media coverage, and the lack of sensitivity of most Americans, this "war" is going to turn into a Fox-style reality TV series. I do think that there should be media coverage, but the coverage needs to remain serious and unbiased (no, not Fox News unbiased, the real unbiased). I don't think this will happen in the near future, but if this trend continues, TV stations could start hyping induvidual battles just to boost ratings. This is similar to what the Romans did when they would recreate battles for the public to see.

Re:President bush announces: no war in Iraq

[h4x0r-3l337]

... and cleans up his own damn mess.

Seeing as how George has already stated he wants the international community to help rebuild Iraq, I'd say the US will just go in, secure "their" oil, and then leave the mess for others to clean up.

waste of money

[Archfeld]

Will read it on the net from a foreign news source just like I would anyways, anything else is so slanted and pre-digested as to be worthless for news anyways.

Re:I'm surprised!

[ibennetch]

As a college student (soon to be graduate) studying broadcasting and television production, I've heard of SNG and it's use for a number of years. The mid-eighties, I think (without bothering to look at my class notes or textbook) is when Satellite News Gathering really took off because costs were down and FCC licensing got less strict.

The thing is, this isn't the same form of SNG -- conventional SNG involves a video feed (along with an audio channel or two and maybe a cell phone call) going out via conventional analog or digital video to a bird and being beamed back down. This, it sounds like, is converting the video to a computer file and essentially emailing that file back via a satellite internet connection. More like wireless networking than traditional SNG.

Re:President bush announces: no war in Iraq

[Tailhook]

lot of innocent civilians ...have been, are and will be killed by Saddam whether we french around or not.

A man tried to escape to Northern Iraq a few days ago. Bathe Party folks captured him. They tied him to a pole, cut out his tounge and let him bleed to death in public. Guess they were too busy to find an acid vat.

Let's roll.

The Logic of War?

[sydlexic]

"All right, let me see if I understand the logic of
this correctly. We are going to ignore the United
Nations in order to make clear to Saddam Hussein that
the United Nations cannot be ignored. We're going to
wage war to preserve the UN's ability to avert war .
The paramount principle is that the UN's word must be
taken seriously, and if we have to subvert its word to
guarantee that it is, then by gum, we will. Peace is
too important not to take up arms to defend. Am I
getting this right?
Further, if the only way to bring democracy to Iraq is
to vitiate the democracy of the Security Council, then
we are honor-bound to do that too, because democracy,
as we define it, is too important to be stopped by a
little thing like democracy as they define it. Also,
in dealing with a man who brooks no dissension at
home, we cannot afford dissension among ourselves.
We must speak with one voice against Saddam Hussein's
failure to allow opposing voices to be heard. We are
sending our gathered might to the Persian Gulf to make
the point that might does not make right, as Saddam
Hussein seems to think it does. And we are twisting
the arms of the opposition until it agrees to let us
oust a regime that twists the arms of the opposition.
We cannot leave in power a dictator who ignores his
own people. And if our people, and people elsewhere in
the world, fail to understand that, then we have no
choice but to ignore them."-
by PETER FREUNDLICH

paying for editorial

[ChrisCampbell47]

Is it better to have more voices in the mix, or for the expert voices not to be drowned out? ... When you get untrained amateurs trying to compete with professionals, you end up with Ain't It Cool News.

I attended a lecture by R. W. Lucky last week, and one of the points he made was that the only thing left to charge for, after bandwidth and processing become practically free, is content. For example, apropos to this topic, well-edited high-quality reporting. Sure, you can have webcams showing every square inch of the planet, but it takes a NYT or CNN to filter that down to something that the average human can digest, given that we all live in real time.

The New York Times survives because of their extremely high journalistic standards (editorial blind spots notwithstanding). CNN has a massive news ingest operation (trust me :) focused on winnowing it down to Good Reporting and Captivating Video. People will pay for this filtered content, even in a world where the raw data is free and easily available. Or so we hope, otherwise we can all look forward to more adolescent shite like Fox News and Drudge ...

Re:President bush announces: no war in Iraq

[Citizen of Earth]

lot of innocent civilians ...have been, are and will be killed by Saddam whether we french around or not.

What do you bet that when the new "inspectors" are done they will uncover paper trails of lots of dirty deals that were underway with the 'coalition of the unwilling': France, Germany, Russia, and China.

Re:Sodamn needs to be killed

[Gordonjcp]

How about just sitting back as Bush turns into Hitler?

George W Bush is an evil terrorist and must be killed before he kills others.