Based in Santiago, CNN Chile is the first 24/7 news station in the country. Launched in December 2008, the station has already become a major player in Latin American television, after achieving high ratings in multiple market segments. Although the company is owned by a partnership formed by Turner Broadcasting System Latin America and Liberty Global VTR, it depends entirely on a local management team, and transmission and production are carried out entirely by Chileans.
In addition to a news production center staffed by local staff, CNN Chile has full access to CNN's global sources of information, which include nearly 4,000 journalists around the globe. For the development of its technological infrastructure, CNN Chile understood from the beginning that it had to have a file-based workflow, to obtain the necessary efficiency to meet the production times inherent in the permanent transmission of news from updated minute to minute. The firm also recognized the risk of inadvertently creating storage "silos," meaning operational segmentation rather than integration. To avoid this, he thought of a collaborative flow, and for this he worked with VGI in Santiago and with multiple first-level vendors, in the specification of a satisfactory infrastructure for these needs.
CNN Chile broadcasts 24 hours with constantly updated time cycles to keep viewers interested and informed as the news evolves. This format indicates that multiple versions of the same story are required each day and, in fact, that some important news clips may be used in different broadcasts over several days, or months, or years, in the future.
The continuous review of the clips means that CNN's editors are what one might call "extreme users" of their Avid nonlinear editing systems. However, Avid is not all they need to do their job well. They also require both a Content Storage Management (CSM) and a Media Asset Management (MAM) manager to work seamlessly in coordination with your Avid.
The solution they chose is Front Porch Digital's DIVarchive CSM system, enhanced with Front Porch's DIVAdirector. DIVArchive is a hardware and software solution that manages, moves, and secures digital media content throughout its lifecycle, from ingestion to long-term preservation, whether stored on disk or tape. DIVAdirector, meanwhile, tracks assets in the storage system, allowing users to traverse content in the form of automatically generated low-bitrate proxies, to create accurately shot lists of a box, and access a flexible metadata model using multiple search tools.
The combination of DIVArchive and DIVAdirector systems gives CNN Chile editors, who work in the familiar Avid environment from their desks, access to content for review, re-versioning or other forms of manipulation.
At the end of each day, CNN Chile relies on DIVArchive to transfer all new content from the day to the archive. At the same time, the system automatically creates low-resolution proxy versions of the material, which are immediately available to producers and editors on their workstations. The partial restore offered allows a particular editor to take only the segment they need from a clip, which is useful in a format like CNN, where repeated re-versions are required.
Implementing a filing system that allows editors to preview proxies, and restore content for manipulation quickly and easily, has become essential to the daily work of CNN journalists, who thereby select the perfect images to illustrate their stories. In a 24/7 news operation with the critical mission of informing viewers well, the reliability of the systems is vital.
While CNN Chile is the first adventure of its kind in Latin America, CNN Worldwide has successful partnerships with channels in other parts of the world, such as CNN+ in Spain, CNN Turk in Turkey, CNNj and CNN.com.jp in Japan, and CNN-IBN in India.
CNN Chile continues to grow to offer the required number of reporters to cover the region in the way it should be done, and to offer news about the wide variety of topics of interest to its audience. CNN Chile is also increasing the number of news it provides to other stations. Such growth is based on a plan drawn from the beginning, in which the technological infrastructure was designed to make it possible. One reason DIVArchive fits so well into CNN's plans is that it was designed as a modular system that can be infinitely scalable. The continuous growth of the amount of material generated daily, and the increase in the number of requests made to the archive, show the path of expansion that CNN Chile has in the foreseeable future.
