Altitude Sports & Entertainment, the most watched regional sports television network in the Rockies, has chosen Octopus Newsroom as its technology partner to enhance production efficiency. A multi-seat Octopus 8 newsroom computer software suite has been installed at Altitude’s Network Operations Center in Centennial, Colorado.

“This new technology will drastically speed up the entire process from the producer’s office right through to the studio, whether live or taped, saving valuable time and providing the ability to create a better on-air product,” Gene Sudduth, Octopus Newsroom’s National Sales Director for North America.

“We are confident that, now installed and in use, Octopus will enable Altitude’s production team to work more efficiently and more enjoyably than was possible with its previous largely manual approach.”

“The core software supplied to Altitude for this project includes a central system to run on user-supplied server hardware. Among the features are an open source PostgreSQL database providing excellent data handling and search facilities plus a full-text search engine capable of locating files within and outside of the system.”

Altitude will license Octopus for simultaneous use by up to 17 operators on any number of workstations. Ten Octopus iOS/Android Mobile client licenses have also been provided, extending Octopus functionality to users away from their desks. An RSS module has been supplied, providing the Altitude team with the ability to ingest those feeds into the Octopus system. Also included is an MOS gateway to enable integration with an unlimited number of MOS devices.

The project included full on-site system integration, interfacing to third-party graphics, prompting and future asset management tie-in plus playout equipment, user and system administrator training and a year of premium support.

Designed for use by television, radio, sports and esports broadcasters, the Octopus newsroom computer system facilitates editorial collaboration between news team members at every stage of the newscast production process, from initial receipt of task notification to complete and advanced rundown management. Octopus enables newsroom staff to ingest all incoming audio, video and still-image files, news agency wires, RSS feeds, emails, SMS messages and even faxes. All content relating to a specific task can be seen in a single view. The tools to publish content to web and social media channels are provided within the same platform.

Suitable for all types and levels of operation, from a single channel with just a few bulletins per day to full-scale round-the-clock news networks, Octopus newsroom software runs natively on Linux, Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X. Mobile apps are available for Google Android and Apple iOS tablets as well as smartphones. Octopus can be integrated into any MOS-compliant environment or workflow.

Seen in more than three million homes in a 10-state territory, Altitude (www.altitude.tv) was created to give area sports fans the most comprehensive regional sports network in the Rocky Mountains. It is the television home of the Denver Nuggets, Colorado Avalanche, Colorado Mammoth, Colorado Rapids, Denver Outlaws, the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference, University of Denver sports (hockey, men’s and women’s basketball, soccer, volleyball, gymnastics and lacrosse), Air Force Academy football shows as well as other local and regional sports, entertainment and public service programming.

Founded in 1998, Octopus Newsroom (www.octopus-news.com) is today the world’s leading producer of newsroom computer systems with more than 50 MOS partners. Octopus Newsroom advocates an open ecosystem using the MOS protocol which enables operators to choose freely among high-quality providers of graphics, playout, MAM, prompters, traffic-handing and advertising solutions. Octopus Newsroom has successfully installed systems into more than 300 channels around the world. Based on Unicode, Octopus Newsroom products support all major character sets including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese.