Meredith Corp taps Telestream for Facebook Live strategy
Details
Michelle Clancy
| 26 February 2017

US broadcast conglomerate Meredith Corp has mandated that its local TV stations stream breaking news and news-related content directly to Facebook Live.


Meredith owns and operates 15 US DTV stations in 13 markets, including Atlanta, Phoenix, St. Louis and Portland, reaching 12 million people, or 11% of US households. It has issued a corporate directivea corporate directive to its digital content teams at its stations to use Facebook Live to reach new viewers that tune into social media more often than TV, connect with loyal viewers outside normal news cycles and serve as a news source for the Facebook community.

“Since live video news is a key service that we provide, Facebook Live presents a unique opportunity for us to raise the visibility of our media brand on Facebook, and to share the timely, trusted news programming that airs on our main channels,” said Larry Oaks, vice president of technology at Meredith.

To support the strategy, Meredith has chosen the Telestream Wirecast Gear appliance — a streaming production solution from Telestream — in all of its markets nationwide, to stream content via Facebook Live, and eventually to other social media platforms, on a regular basis.

“Our primary interest is to use Wirecast Gear for breaking news outside our typical news cycle but also for simulcasts of our studio broadcast, or promotional and pre-recorded content,” said Oaks. “With the ability to interface with our routers, we can drive any content from our facility or a remote shoot to Facebook Live, complete with branding.”

Wirecast Gear integrates a user interface; image branding, graphics and keying for the placement of logo bugs; multi-camera switching, audio mixing, roll-ins, green screen keying and other production tools; and connections to go live on leading social media sites.

For the last seven years, Meredith has been using Telestream's Vantage platform*running on Lightspeed servers to automate its media processing operations.

“When we were evaluating our choices, Wirecast Gear met all of our criteria,” Oaks said. “This includes integrating the key live production capabilities we need into a single, compact, affordable system that’s easy to learn and operate. More importantly, Wirecast makes it simple to get a secure connection and start streaming media to social destinations. We just select Facebook Live from a pull-down menu and it facilitates whatever handshake, log-in or settings we need to start streaming quickly and reliably.”