The fifth thematic visit of the EBU’s Integrated Media Production Strategies (IMPS) programme brought 23 participants from 13 EBU Members to the newly integrated newsroom at EBU Member Südwestrundfunk (SWR), in Stuttgart this week.

The interdisciplinary IMPS group addresses technological, editorial and workflow questions, as well as organizational change management at convergent broadcast organizations.

This visit, on 14 and 15 March, focused on the experience gained when SWR’s new tri-media production complex was created. Consolidating previously separate services into one purpose-made, convergence-oriented facility has simplified life for SWR staff in a convergent media environment.

In a staggered relocation process TV, the most complex production environment, moved in first followed by radio and online. Today, news teams from all three platforms sit closer together than ever before on one floor with only glass partitions between them.

An integrated regional news desk enables tri-media planning and coordination, and news and current affairs editors from the three platforms meet twice daily to discuss reporting the day’s big stories.

Their counterparts in SWR’s eight regional bureaus join these meetings by phone, while the head of the tri-media regional news desk and her colleagues hold editorial meetings and ensure journalists from all three platforms keep talking.

From a technical point of view, the IMPS visitors were struck by the high level of IT-only infrastructure and flexible automation design, which can adapt to future needs. And the team’s workflow modelling exercise also impressed, since high definition is fully integrated as the principle production format.

All ingested formats are transcoded to a 50 Mbit/s HD format and, although everything is up and running, some integration and interoperability challenges remain. These include metadata, MXF varieties and trawling the world of generic IT servers with special broadcast systems.

SWR staff have also found that full TV and radio integration is still challenging in terms of an overall media asset management system, so increased automation is a future objective.

The next IMPS visit will be to Danish EBU Member DR, in June. Subsequently, the IMPS team will summarize their findings for EBU Members in due course.