How strange (odd choices in news programmes)

I've just found another example of this, from Central News in 2003. They even have time for a teaser and title sequence:

That really was a hideous set and graphics package.

I've spoken to some people who know - and NRK did roll out Mosart to their regions as per the press release. They have since replaced it entirely with their own open source solution, developed by Superfly, which is called Sofie.

I guess Mosart has some hefty annual support costs - or wasn't doing what they wanted it to.

That must of been an expensive to roll out and then remove. Does Mosart use the standard Viz engine boxes? I understand they use off the shelf commercial PCs and graphics cards. If they purchased the boxes could they be repurposed for this use?

I think Mosart will drive VizRT graphics engines, but it will also drive <sharp intake of breath> CasparCG too (even though Viz tried to sue SVT over that particular development) TV2 in Copenhagen have Mosart driving Caspar for their key+fill titles Playout.

However 5 years is a normal 'capital life pay off' for a piece of broadcast hardware, and 3-4 years isn't unusual in IT hardware terms. Sure most broadcasters will sweat their assets for far longer than this (BBC English regions are experts at this - with some regions having kit that is 20+ years old, and many IT operations are upgrading old laptops with SSDs and more RAM rather than replacing them now) and as we move to more COTS-based systems, the cost is usually not in hardware but in licensing the software that runs on them, and the support costs. It's easy for the hardware costs to be less than 10% of the actual costs of equipment use these days.

Looking at CG/gfx platforms rather than automation per se, a VizRT graphics engine may have a hardware cost of £5k or less, but a licence cost of £40k or more, plus an annual support fee that is far from insignificant. If this licence cost is paid annually rather than as a one-off, or you have a significant SLA for support, then the cost of the actual hardware ceases to be the barrier.

CasparCG has a similar order-of-magnitude hardware cost as a VizRT box (though it uses lower cost SDI I/O cards) but your licensing costs are zero (as the software is free, as in beer), and your support costs are what you need to support in-house, or with an SLA for a smaller third party that will support it for you. (The latter is the biggest barrier to wide spread adoption of lower cost, open source solutions in broadcast)

NBC News Overnight was a truly odd newscast. It was unusually relaxed (its jacketless look was revolutionary for the early 1980s), intelligent, vaguely cynical, and always well-written.

Here is one of the last editions before it became the victim of cost-cutting:

Some interesting use of chromakey by Thames News back in 1980 -- similar to what several U.S. and French broadcasters were doing at the time:

TV in Turkmenistan may no longer have a permanent on-screen bug/ DOG of Turkmenbashi's bust (the dictator died in 2006), but the aesthetics (and the content) of the main evening news in this secretive former Soviet republic are still out-of-this-world:

I was half expecting to see Borat presenting the news.

Basing your news theme on the pop classic Do You Know The Way to San Jose? may sound like an odd choice -- but it makes more sense if your station is in San Jose:

Some years later, WGCL in Atlanta rebranded its newscasts as Clear News and adopted a version of I Can See Clearly Now (The Rain is Gone) as its theme:

Was this a botched attempt to copy the earlier title sequence(s) of VGTRK's Vesti ? It used to feature the galloping troika.