PRESS RELEASE

See Octopus on Booth SL7627 at NAB 2018, Las Vegas, April 9-12

NAB Las Vegas Preview:

San Francisco, CA, February 12, 2018 – Octopus Newsroom will debut version 8.1 of its industry-leading newsroom computer system to the American broadcast market at the April 9-12 2018 NAB Show in Las Vegas. Exhibiting on booth SL7627 – South Hall, Lower – the company will be represented by Gene Sudduth (National Sales Director for North America), Gianluca Bertuzzi (Sales Manager for Latin America) and management teams from Europe and Asia.

Announced at IBC in September 2017 and now deliverable, the Octopus version 8.1 release adds a record number of new features and improvements. Version 8.1 is now available to all new customers and as a free upgrade to existing customers with an active support contract, Standard or Premium.

 

Among new features designed to increase newsroom efficiency are:

  • Enhanced assignment sorting and grouping.
  • Advanced clip and rundown management.
  • Rules-based archiving of social media content.
  • Live on-air insertion of social media posts.
  • Fast conform of rundown timing after a rehearsal.
  • Quick story editing.
  • Rapid clip insertion/replacement.
  • Custom shortcuts allowing new slugs in a rundown to be created faster than ever.

 

Version 8.1 also introduces drag-and-drop of emails to Topic from the most often used desktop email clients. Main menu items can now be colour-coded on a freely customizable basis and repeatable assignments are now supported. In addition, the Journalist app can now record audio clips for easy attachment to the relevant story.

Social media integration, already a strong feature of Octopus, is enhanced with the ability to handle Facebook comments. Twitter posting now allows 280 characters instead of the former limit of 140 characters, and video can now be posted directly from Octopus to Twitter as well.

Among other new operational features are detachable notification widgets, the ability to display all named rundowns in the main menu, a default custom print form per menu item and the addition of user rights for MOS devices.

“These are just a sample of the many new facilities introduced during this upgrade,” adds Gene Sudduth. “We will also be promoting the successful use of Octopus for sports broadcasting as well as mainstream news reporting and presentation. Sports broadcasting generally follows a more spontaneous style than the tightly scripted approach used in most news productions. Our system is successfully used in both roles.”

Compatible with Octopus 8.1, Octopus 8 and the most recent versions of Octopus 7, the Octopus Mobile app offers journalists full news production capabilities on tablets and mobile phones running Apple iOS or Google Android. Reporters and editors working remotely gain instant access to all wires, rundowns and assignments. They can also edit stories within a rundown, preview prompter text as well as create wires and reports in the field.

With 18 years of experience, over 220 customers around the world and more than 50 MOS partners, Octopus Newsroom (www.octopus-news.com) is the world’s leading producer of newsroom computer systems. Octopus Newsroom advocates an open ecosystem using the MOS protocol which enables customers 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 220 channels around the world. Based on Unicode, Octopus Newsroom products support all major character sets including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese.

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