Customer Case VGTV

PODCAST PRODUCTION WITH RADIOMAN

RadioMan makes it possible to produce podcast type audio stories quickly by gathering the bits and pieces of the story to a playlist ordered structure and then run the playlist with speech and comments. Finally, the whole programme can be recorded either as a single recording or as a multi-channel production.

customer story

Schibsted-owned VGTV Norway is a perfect example of what it looks like to adapt to the shift in how new media is produced. Their video operation spin-off of the leading Norwegian newspaper, VG, has several online and linear television channels, including a 24/7 news channel, that provide popular high-quality content to a vast and loyal audience. VGTV chose RadioMan for their podcast production. The first studio was setup and operational for podcast production within few weeks.

The podcast Papaya talents Tore Sagen, Steinar Sagen and Bjarte Tjøstheim in the new temporary studio that was put up in a few weeks. Next year they are moving into more permanent facilities, but the technique stays the same

what did we do

VGTV selected Lawo IP Audio environment as the audio backbone and RadioMan system for production environment. The audio infrastructure consists of multiple audio studios with microphones and AES67/Ravenna audio interfaces. All the mixing and routing in the IP network is done by Lawo audio cores and Vistool control interfaces. 

The user interfaces for RadioMan planning and On-Air are browser-based so that the back-end processes are in AWS Cloud. The Vistool U/I environment allows embedding the RadioMan On Air user interface inside the Vistool screen  but it was decided to run the interfaces parallel. This allows larger screen area for the RadioMan U/I.

The RadioMan back-end includes all the business logic and media management of the system. The back-end includes also On-Air Daemons that control the playout activities physically done by the RadioMan Media Node units. The role of the Media Nodes is to act as the player units enhanced with audio mixing, routing and streaming capabilities. With this configuration the Media Nodes can be placed freely in the cloud or on premises. In this use case the RadioMan Media Nodes are placed on-premises with virtual machines and virtual IP audio drivers.

why radioman?

The configuration allows users to produce and import audio material into the RadioMan system located in AWS Cloud and create predefined playlists for podcasts. Planning and preparation tasks and podcast “broadcasting” can be done either remotely or from studio using standard PC computer and web browser. The broadcasting session is then recorded in multi-channel mode with local RadioMan Media Node placed in studio or other premises. The multi-channel recording includes also microphones and external feeds.  For remote operations the audio contribution to the system can be established directly from the browser via WebRtc and for other contributions various codec streams like RTP, SRT etc can be used

After podcast playout, the recorded audio material is then edited and finalized with a multitrack audio editor. The edited audio files can then be transferred directly to the media company digital media publishing environment or they can be stored to the RadioMan Media Asset Management system with all the associated metadata. From RadioMan the audio clips, programme recordings and partial clippings can be sent to the media company digital publishing environment via the RadioMan Media Publish API of the system.

The studio environment utilize the Lawo IP Audio infrastructure. All the planning and media operations including On-Air activities can be done also remotely. For these use cases the remote studio instances can be kept light with USB audio mixers for microphones and telephone/Conference APP interfaces. Audio feed from the studio sets to the Cloud is via WebRTC. This configuration allows also remote contribution via browser user interface and RadioMan LIVE Contribution anywhere.