So I’m reading a lengthy write through about a new geo-location app called “Banjo” and thinking to myself, “Wow, the implications for the news business are huge. I wonder if anybody sees this?”
Well, sure enough, Sinclair Broadcast Group (SBGI), parent company of KOMO, is playing around with it… apparently as part of a larger effort beating the bushes for new tech. Here’s the paragraph from the article that spells it out:
“Banjo’s applications in media are the most developed. Sinclair Broadcasting, a publicly traded company encompassing 162 television stations in 79 markets, had nothing but praise for Patton and his work: “Banjo has allowed us to enhance our coverage across all screens in a very fluid and easy solution,” says Rob Weisbord, COO of Sinclair Digital Group. He says Sinclair now uses Banjo in eight of its TV stations and plans to roll it out to more. “I think Damien’s only scratched the surface of what he–and we–can do.”
Right now, this application is probably best used in its currently envisioned “social listening” space, but I can really see it moving forward as an automated content creator where live, raw images are fed directly to broadcasters or say, Periscope, to provide near real-time feeds from news events.
I think it would probably have to be prepared for broadcast by fixing these current aps penchant for “vertical video” (i.e. they don’t support 16:9) through scaling and stabilization and possibly encoding into a video-based stream – but imagine being able to take a live feed from all the people pushing-out social media at an event.
Yes, the editorial judgement piece rears its ugly head here as it does with any crowd-sourcing tool, but the times, they are a’ changin’ and TV news, video production and social media are going to converge in ways we can’t even imagine as we sit here in 2015.
