While “remote production” became a buzzword during the COVID pandemic, with stations emptied and key workflows handled by employees working from home via VPNs or the cloud, producing local news has always required journalists working remotely in the field. And while most personnel have since returned to stations and studios, it has remained business as usual for newsgathering teams, whether it’s a camera operator grabbing a live shot on the street, an editor cutting a story in the back of a news van or a reporter pounding out a script at their favorite coffee shop.
If anything, advances in IP connectivity, cloud technology and smartphones have made it easier than ever for news crews to remain in the field and produce and deliver their work remotely, saving valuable time as they meet the demands of today’s multi-platform, 24/7 news cycle. The same tools are also enabling better sharing of content between stations, bureaus and networks and helping to support coverage in previously underserved areas, according to top executives who gathered at TVNewsCheck’s NewsTECHForum in New York last week for the panel “Remote Production & the Non-Stop News Cycle,” moderated by this reporter.
Spectrum’s Local Expansion
Spectrum Networks, the local news arm of cable operator Charter Communications known for hyper-local, 24/7 operations like its flagship NY1 in New York City, is now taking advantage of improved connectivity and better smartphone apps to expand into new markets like Maine and Alabama, bringing its total to 30 local news networks.
While the company enjoys traditional “brick-and-mortar” facilities like NY1 in about 10 markets, with newsrooms, studios and a full on-site staff, it is using a distributed model in its expansion markets, said Sam Singal, Spectrum Networks group VP of editorial and content,.
About a half-dozen employees including reporters, producers and executive producers are spread across an expansion state like Maine to gather and produce material, which is then sent back to one of Spectrum’s two big hubs, one in upstate New York and one in Los Angeles. The local content is then blended for insertion with common stories that are shared across the Spectrum stations, including national coverage from a Washington bureau that Spectrum dramatically expanded last year.
Singal said that improved content-sharing between its traditional outlets had helped make the expansion markets possible. About a third of the coverage in a market like Maine will be hyper-local news and weather, while the rest will be common material.
“We have almost as many of these remote operations as we do brick-and-mortar,” Singal said. “And so, we have come up with a way to gather all of that information, curate it in the field, sometimes in coffee shops, sometimes in conference rooms of buildings, and put it all together.”
For the past 18 months, he added, Spectrum has been working with a vendor to develop “a much more efficient news operating system,” that will allow material to be shared with “a couple clicks” instead of having to upload files and send links between stations. That new system is currently in the process of being rolled out across the Spectrum properties.
One thing that won’t change is Spectrum’s heavy use of Apple iPhones, which are used to both shoot and transmit the “vast majority of stories,” Singal said. “We have become very, very nimble via the iPhone.”
New Connectivity Choices For Fox
The ability to connect to personnel in the field has always been key for local stations but has taken on new importance with the sheer amount of content they have to create today for digital platforms, said Erik Smith, VP of news operations and technology, Fox Television Stations.
“The change for local broadcasters is that we really are now 24/7/365 as well with our CTV apps and our FAST channels,” Smith said. “We are no longer just producing a number of hours of linear.”
After first experimenting with Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites a few years ago, the technology has become a trusted tool and was used to deliver much of Fox’s coverage of the Los Angeles wildfires last January.
“Starlink, or whatever your flavor of LEO is, is absolutely a tool,” Smith said. ‘It’s a part of our day-to-day workflow at all of our station group. We don’t build a truck without it anymore.”
Like other big groups, Fox is heavily reliant on bonded cellular technology for live feeds and overall connectivity in the field. It uses LiveU packs to aggregate capacity from major carriers Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T. It is also making use of LiveU’s mobile app to let a smartphone serve as a complete acquisition and contribution tool for some of its reporting, particularly for digital coverage, where it handles “everything,” Smith said, including video and audio transmission as well as IFB functions.
While that kind of coverage and the glitches that come with it might not appeal to every viewer, they work for those who want to “consume news in a TikTok world,” he said.
“We’re being raw and authentic, and it gives us an opportunity to tell live stories in a different way,” Smith added. “And there’s a comfort level, too, when we have a journalist that’s out in the field with a iPhone and a $100 DJI Osmo gimbal, it’s a lot less intimidating [for interviews] than when that big ENG camera rolls up and the microphone’s getting shoved in their face. And so, the live content that we’re doing with the phones kind of fits that world and what we’re looking to achieve.”
Another area where FTS is experimenting with cellular technology is private 5G, which has been successfully used for live feeds by corporate cousin Fox Sports. Smith is readying a POC of a private 5G network with T-Mobile at WTXF Philadelphia. The station plans to use T-Mobile’s 5G “Edge Control” to do ultra-low-latency video transmission within the building and then potentially out to field crews as well.
Hearst Leans On Legacy Links
Hearst Television is also a heavy user of bonded cellular, working with TVU Networks backpacks, Grid storage and associated systems, said Joe Addalia, Hearst Television VP broadcast technology. And like Fox and other groups it has seen some improvement in coverage and capacity with the rollout of 5G. At the very least 5G has given Hearst six different networks for its TVU bonded packs to tap into at a live location (the LTE and 5G networks from each major carriers), which helps it find the sustained capacity it needs for uploading live feeds.
But there are still times when network congestion or lack of coverage make bonded cellular problematic, and in those instances Hearst employs legacy tools like microwave links and satellite trucks in “a tiered approach.” Hearst is unique among independent station groups in that it maintains its own dedicated Ku-band satellite capacity, and it still operates 36 traditional SNG trucks across the group.
“We see them as a competitive edge, so we still support these trucks,” Addalia said. “We’ll still take them out into moose country or out to Lake Tahoe or wherever there’s no connectivity, and we’ve got that robust live shot.”
Hearst also still operates microwave links in markets where they are necessary to deliver live feeds from its news helicopters, as bonded cellular tools are not allowed by the FAA for that application. As such, it maintains a few microwave trucks to take advantage of it for occasional use.
“What that brings is dedicated, licensed bandwidth,” Addalia said. “And we can create that point-to-point link, and it can stay up as long as you want. Now, it doesn’t help us in the file-based world, you still need a hotspot or some other device to help you in the file-based world. But when you’re talking about being live for an extended period of time and not have to worry about everyone else using a device and sharing the bandwidth, there are still some traditional tools that do perform and do work well.”
Addalia is also interested in perhaps using LEO technology in the future. But since that is public capacity like 5G today, he would like the option of using multiple providers to aggregate capacity, as Hearst does with its bonded packs today.
Camera-To-Cloud For Sinclair
Sinclair is looking to use IP links from the field like 5G as part of a complete transformation of the production process at its 65 news-producing stations, said Ernie Ensign, its AVP, news technology & operations. The core problem is that the group captures around 100,000 hours of raw content a month, but only uses perhaps 3%-5% of it. Content that doesn’t make it in the linear newscast but could be used to provide additional context and depth of reporting for digital winds up going to waste.
“We need better ways to reformat, repackage that content, and get that to our audiences wherever they are,” Ensign said.
Sinclair plans to move from a traditional rundown-based workflow, where the station serves as the production hub, to a storycentric model in which everything associated with a story — including scripts, metadata, video, reporter details and notes — is encapsulated with it and accessible through the cloud.
“I know storycentric has been a buzzword for 10 years, but I think a few things are coalescing in the industry that are really making it possible,” Ensign said. “The camera-to-cloud workflows are coming to fruition, and being able to insert metadata and story information from the ingestion of content and bringing that content in and having it immediately available for producers to take actions on. You’ve got vendors who are really leaning into storycentric and abandoning legacy workflows, and leveraging cloud-native technology. And then you’ve got the AI tools, that if you have everything encapsulated in a story, it really opens up those possibilities of some of the agentic workflows and some of the AI orchestration.”
AI is only as good as its instructions and context, Ensign said, so bundling everything together should allow it to process a story more efficiently, reduce “platform fatigue” and give producers quicker access to content. The goal is to allow versioning for multiple platforms to happen in parallel, instead of being a time-consuming step-by-step process.
Sinclair is actively testing a full camera-to-cloud workflow in five markets and plans to roll out additional markets in 2026. “It’s in operation, and it has helped accelerate getting that content in sooner so that we can decide where that content needs to be published and produced,” Ensign said.
Sinclair also hopes to use Sony’s new PXW-Z300 camcorder to test content authentication from the field using the new C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) specification. Ensign and other panelists said that pursuing broad C2PA adoption was key in the face of rapidly proliferating “deep fake” content produced by new generative AI tools.
Web-Based Progress For Dalet
The industry has come a long way from 20 years ago, said Marcy Lefkovitz, Dalet SVP of product innovation, when implementing end-to-end field-to-studio digital workflows “required a big backpack full of very heavy, very bespoke tools to enable remote users and people out in the field to do journalism.”
Today the tools are readily available, including mobile apps that give full access to a newsroom computer system, something broadcasters have long asked for. But Lefkovitz doesn’t believe broadcasters have to jump fully into the cloud to enable such workflows.
“I don’t think you have to go to cloud for this,” she said. “The cloud certainly helps. But what you do need is web-based. And when all of your tools are web-based and proper Kubernetes, then you can solve for these pain points and not make your customers have to choose who their ‘favorite children’ are. They can enable any of your distribution endpoints, no matter where your users are, whether they’re in the production facility, at home or out in the field.”
Lefkovitz said area of significant recent progress is in web-based editors, which have long been dismissed by news editors as not having the necessary tools included in craft editors like Adobe or Avid.
“We are definitely seeing it, and I would almost argue that the web-based editors are closer and closer and closer to traditional craft editing than they have been, even quite recently,” Lefkovitz said.
She said that for news customers, she used that tell them that web-based editors could handle about 80% of what they needed. That would allow them to do an initial edit in the field and then “clean it up a little bit” with a craft editor back at the station. But at least for Dalet, the technology has significantly improved.
“I would say for hard news our web-based editor is 100% there,” Lefkovitz said. “You have to provide a path for your customers to be able to finish with an Adobe, for example, and we definitely have that. And certainly for long form or something that has a little bit more time, you might want to do that. But I really think that our web-based editor is there.
“It’s really got the advantage of being the same wherever you are,” she continued. “And I would even include graphics in that. We don’t talk a lot about graphics out in the field. But when all of these tools are integrated, you really don’t want to say, ‘Oh, I’ve got my script, I’ve got my edit, my video, I’ve got my rough cut edit, and now the roadblock is somebody back at home has to insert the graphics.’ You really want to be able to have one person or one small team of people do everything in one tool set, and then go the next step and just get it distributed to all of the different places that it needs to go.”
About Glen Dickson
Glen Dickson has over 25 years of experience working in the media industry, most of it spent writing about the technology behind broadcast and cable television. He is currently a contributing editor to TVNewsCheck and a freelance writer for several publications. He previously served as senior editor of the Broadcasting & Cable, where he led its technology coverage as well as related podcasts, seminars and conferences. Dickson has served as a speaker at major industry conventions including the Consumer Electronics Show and NAB Show and also worked as an investor relations consultant to media and technology companies. He holds a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania. Follow him on X: @GlenDickson