Control room design for live televisednews casting

Abstract: The progress of digital technologies within the television industry has led to moreadvanced equipment, both for private and professional use. One specific area wherethis development has been noticed is in control rooms used to conduct live or tapedtelevision broadcasts. To conduct "traditional" live broadcasted programs, a variety ofoperators in the control room works and each operator is responsible for one specificequipment, such as a sound engineers and vision engineer.The digitization of technical equipment has also meant that all equipment used duringa newscast can be controlled from other devices, for example an external computer.This concept is known as centralization. The centralization has made possible thatonly one or two operators can be in charge of conducting an entire broadcast. The aimof this investigation has been to investigate how the production has been affected bycentralization, not only from a technical point of view but also how all those involvedto create a newscast has been affected.The apparent result has been that the amount of staff in the control room has beenreduced and this has led to further consequences for the remaining staff in production.The centralization has resulted in a less costly production for the production companyin the long run, because of the decreasing in staff. It has also resulted in additionalwork task for all staff involved in creating and broadcasting the news.The extended technical task for the operators in a centralized control room has meantthat the priority of focusing on the visual parts of the broadcast have decreased andtherefore, the visual aspects have been neglected. This factor was confirmed both bythe television viewers and editorial staff during different focus groups.Wider technical knowledge as well as greater dedication towards the overallresponsibility to carry out a broadcast is required from the operators operating in acentralized control room. The editorial staffs extending tasks in the form of keepingtrack of time and writing different headlines hasn’t directly affected the work tasks inthe sense of news gathering and filtering, only that additional responsibility has beenadded to them.The general mistake that occurs when the broadcasting is conducted in centralizedcontrol rooms, for all involving in the production, are preparation mistakes. It can forexample be incorrect programming from the operators or misspellings conducted bythe editorial staff, which in a traditional control rooms isn’t as common. However,centralized control rooms have reduced the mistakes during an actual broadcast,contrary to traditional control rooms. This is because the centralization andcomputerization generally has removed vast mistakes caused out the human factor.