Broadcasters across India are laying plans to ensure thorough news coverage of the country’s parliamentary general elections will be held between April and May of this year. This will see the dissolution and replacement of the Lok Sabha (House of the People) national legislative assembly.

“Octopus has long been most trusted broadcast newsroom system in India and will be used by many networks to ensure efficient coverage of this very important political event,” says Octopus APAC Director Miro Rusko.

“Reporters across the various constituencies will be using the Octopus Mobile App to create media assets on their mobile phones and transmit them straight back to their respective newsroom colleagues. There the stories will be ingested into the main Octopus newsroom computer system and combined with related content for use in up-to-the-minute newsflashes, scheduled bulletins and in-depth discussion programmes.”

“Reporters will be able to file their stories straight from the various political party headquarters, including field reports and interviews with electors attending the many voting centres. Video and audio, or just audio on its own, can be streamed live back to base or sent as packaged files. The Octopus Mobile App even allows reporters to perform basic editing before their colleagues back at base make more detailed adjustments. These capabilities give Octopus-equipped channels the all-important edge over their competitors in terms of production speed.”

“A key strength of Octopus is that it is the perfect tool for collaboration and delivery to television, radio, the web and social media, all in a single newsroom solution. That elevates newsroom operation to a whole new level, increasing creativity, improving efficiency and enabling the various team members to operate as a unified production resource.

A publishing platform for use in television, radio and online news broadcasting, Octopus allows easy ingest of all incoming source materials such as agency wires, RSS feeds and emails. It can display in a single view all content belonging to a feed, including images, video files or audio files. A powerful relational database with SQL enables users to achieve their goals faster. With its topic-centric workflow, Octopus helps different teams within TV, radio and online portals work collaboratively on current affairs programmes and news items.

Octopus runs natively on Apple Mac OS X, Linux or Microsoft Windows so there is no need for a parallel operating system, additional licensing or remote sessions. Hot-standby servers can be added, offering automatic client switchover if the primary server is offline. An easy to use REST API allows customers to build their own applications which can communicate and exchange certain data with the newsroom system.

Octopus Newsroom (www.octopus-news.com) was founded in 1999 and is today the world’s leading producer of newsroom computer systems. With over 50 MOS partners, Octopus 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, advertising solutions including many other features. 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.

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